1.

A photograph in black and white, taken with a Zenit vintage Soviet camera. Taken outside what would much later become Tong Yun City, in the days when it was still just a cobbled-together mass of crash-landed jalopies, connected with primitive tubing into a small yet constantly growing habitat. At the time it was simply called Terminal.

The photo was taken at night. The flare of a deorbiting thruster overhead provides a startling glare of illumination. Several jalopies rest on the ground, most of them intact, one broken. Several humans wearing life-support suits are frozen in motion between the landed jalopies.

Amongst them but somewhat apart, a humanoid robot has its face turned back towards the camera, the expression in its eyes impossible to read.

 

2.

A high-angle shot taken with a drone. Late afternoon. The sun is a puncture in the sky. A long convoy of large-wheeled, insulated trucks departs a settlement—Tong Yun around a century after the first photo was taken, with workers in exoskeletons constructing its now-famous dome. The trucks probably carry more workers, though their destination is unclear. Their tires leave marks in the dust, but a hidden breeze already blurs them away.

 

3.

A polaroid, taken inside a jalopy on its way to Mars. Shot at an angle—the photographer and camera floating in zero gravity. A mirror fixed to the metal wall captures half of the photographer’s face—a young woman, dark hair growing long, half of a serious face with one eye visible in the mirror. A corkboard fixed to the wall is hanging with many other polaroids so taken, pinned to the cork. A narrow window looks out into space, offering a sliced view of stars and other jalopies. Mars is not visible. Taken during the early days of Terminal Beach. The woman in the photograph is not believed to have survived the landing.

 

4.

A dog, looking into the camera. Somewhere in El Jem, near the souk. Black and white digital image. It’s a surprising composition—dogs did not adjust well to the Martian gravity, while cats proliferate. The dog looks mangy, its eyes sad. There is a cherry tree behind the dog, in early bloom. The bottom half of people walking past can be seen, most in workers’ overalls.

 

5.

An old man sits on a bench inside a small domed town in the Martian Outback, watching the setting sun. This is your great-great-grandfather, Joaquín. His bare arms bear old tattoos: faded blue ink of Earth birds and flowers, a heron, a shower of angel’s trumpets. The train tracks extend out into the Martian desert beyond the dome, and a train is visible in the distance, an old Ares Express model going past Port Jessup and La Navidad on the way to the Valles Marineris kibbutzim. Joaquín wears a plain copper wedding ring on the second finger of his left hand. Two of the fingers on his right hand are missing from an old work injury.

There is an empty space next to him where your great-great-grandmother, Olha, might have sat alongside him, but there is only her absence in the picture. Joaquín sits alone, and the train passing by will not stop in the town; it’s headed elsewhere.

 

6.

A satellite shot of Mars from orbit, with the moons visible. Machines reduced to the size of ants at a distance crawl on the surface of Phobos, digging warrens into its interior.

On the surface of the planet one can discern the great dome of Tong Yun, the web of railway tracks, El Jem. Much of the surface remains uninhabited. Small towns dot the desert here and there. Much of Mars is hidden underground—housing, the vast fish tanks that go on for miles, bug farms and hydroponics. A flash of sunlight visible in the picture is refracted from the solar panel of a passing communication satellite.

 

7.

A photo of your father and me, just before you were born. We’re standing with our arms around each other, smiling a little awkwardly at the photographer. We look ridiculously young. We took the train into Tong Yun for the day and went down to Level Three, where the Multifaith Bazaar is. We’re posing in between a Church of Robot node and a shrine to Okgo. You can’t smell it, but just out of shot is a stall selling xiaolongbao steaming in bamboo baskets, and the scent of soy and vinegar from the dipping sauce was making me very hungry just then. I could feel you kick inside me, as if you smelled it too.

I was feeling tired that day. I think you can see it in my eyes. Your dad had wanted to find an Alice rose—it’s a kind that only grows in the cloud-cities in the atmosphere high above Venus. He wanted it for your granddad, the old man kept trying to grow new kinds of roses. His orchids were famous, they even got exported off world. Mushel’s Orchids. I remember the first time I came into his shop. The smell just hit you, this explosion of perfume. He told me he couldn’t even smell them after a while. Laughed when he said it, too. He grew orchids but his passion was roses.

Anyway, that’s partly why we were there. Your dad thought there was a flower broker on Level Three who could get the seeds from Venus. But we never found the shop. Either it wasn’t there or the broker had gone out of business, or your dad just had the wrong information. And I was tired, and you were heavy inside me. After a while I just wanted to go home.

 

8.

A cat on a windowsill. The cat is a tabby. His name is Bela, after some old Earth actor. In the photo, he’s already thirteen years old. He dozes behind glass. He was your grandmother’s cat, my mother’s. She lived on the second floor of a co-op building in El Jem, not far from the Polytechnic. Her name was Bella Chen, she’d taught ethnography there for many years. Bella and Bela. She thought it was funny. Before I was born she spent most of her time in the Outback, moving from place to place, just talking to people, writing things down. Stories, songs, old traditions. That’s how she met my father. He worked on the rails.

There was a song she liked to sing to me when I was small, tucked into bed and worried about school:

They sing a song across the poles
A warble too rapid for human ears
As deep as time, they’re shallow pools
Who dream of stars and hear our tears.

It took me years to understand it—that the song was about the Others, those digital intelligences in the Conversation. They are too alien for us to speak with often, though some like to flesh-surf and some even become Joined with a human. You don’t remember her, do you, your Grandma Bella. She used to rock you in her arms to sleep when you were just a baby.

 

9.

Undated photo taken with an analog camera, somewhere in the south pole. This was supposedly taken by your great-grandfather, Anton, whose stories one could never verify but ranged across Mars and up into space. I only knew him as an old man, whose co-op apartment always smelled of star anise and cloves and something endlessly bubbling on the gas stove. He liked analog. Besides his cameras he had a gramophone with a stack of vinyl records, mostly music from the turn of the second century since Terminal. There was always music playing when we came to visit him. His one allowance for the digital was his toaster, who he used to argue with endlessly the right way to make toast.

The photo feels like it was taken surreptitiously. It shows a group of humans in surface suits huddled in the ice, lowering an enormous black metal pipe casing into a shaft opened in the soil. One of the human figures is half-turned towards the camera. Its visor reflects the image of a crane dangling some huge, anomalous object from its nylon tethers as its thrusters glow eerily against the reflective ice. Even in the static photo, at least a century old, it’s hard to make out the object clearly. It seems to shift and change the more you stare at it. It used to scare me as a child, looking at that photograph.

Anton claimed he took the photo in the pole, during the installation of the Cores there.

“Clan Ayodhya,” he’d say, stabbing the photo with his finger, indicating the silent figures. The human mercenaries who guard the Others’ physical infrastructure with their lives. The location of the Cores is a jealously guarded secret. They could be anywhere—redundancy is built into the Others’ survival. But it is generally believed that the first ones were installed in the poles.

“They’re deep under the ice now,” Anton would say, with some strange satisfaction. I was never sure, as a girl, if he’d meant just the Cores themselves or the people, too.

 

10.

Satellite image taken over the south pole. There is nothing there, of course—no indication of that strange photo of my grandfather’s. An old archaeological dig can be seen like a spot on the hide of an arctic hare in the Promethei Chasma canyon. Not that I have ever seen an arctic hare in real life. I have never been off world.

There are all kinds of wild stories about the southern polar plain. How they dug some sort of alien DNA out of the ice there—what they use to make augs now. I don’t believe any of it myself. The nearest train line terminates at the edge of the Planum Australe. A solitary dome, white like the ice, marks the end of the line like a punctuation mark.

 

11.

This one’s a publicity still. I used to collect them. Did I ever tell you that? You could write to Phobos Studios and sometimes they’d send you random giveaways like that. This one’s a shot from an episode of Chains of Assembly. Don’t ask me which one. It was a long story arc that saw the Beautiful Maharani captured in the southern polar region by the Evil Generalissimo, and Johnny Novum tried to rescue her. But the Beautiful Maharani escaped on her own and found her way to the tunnels under the ice, where there was a tribe of wild robots.

The print is glossy, in black and white. It shows the Beautiful Maharani meeting the leader of the wild robots for the first time. He is humanoid, blandly handsome. She is fearsome in her passion. Their faces are close together, caught in sharp relief. There are no shadows. The characters in the soap are changeless, immortal. The storylines never end. I used to love watching it with your grandmother. I still do, sometimes, on my own. But it’s not the same, when you’re alone.

 

12.

Oh, this is one of yours! You’re around five in this picture, I think. We went to visit your aunt and cousins in Port Jessup. I took your photo with you and your cousin Niamh near the space port. It’s not grand, just a long stretch of packed and blasted sands where small surface-to-orbit ships dose in the sun, their bodies drab with old and peeling paint. We’d taken the train from El Jem to visit. You loved the small train station and the small and stern station master who welcomed the passengers. Her name was Saranya, and she kept a gold watch on a chain hanging from her waistband, that she always checked and that you just thought was so grand.

The photo is a bit blurry. There was a dust storm coming in from the direction of La Navidad. You never went there, I don’t think. It’s a hive-mind warren. They-all were good friends of your Grandma Bella. She used to take me there when I was a kid, but I always found it strange, how everyone there spoke in one voice, they were all one thing. Port Jessup’s a very traditional dome town. Your father grew up there. He, too, loved the space port. He always talked about going to space one day—remember? Maybe that’s where you get your restlessness and your curiosity from, from him. I was always happiest right here.

Going into space, going to the Up and Out—I never saw a need for it. Mars is a whole world. On Earth water falls from the skies whenever it wants; it seems wasteful. Spaceships smell of rust and overcooked cabbage, in my imagination. Like that converted diner in Port Jessup. We come from a long line of family, of restless people who left one home to start another. Your grandma travelling the Outback, your great-great-grandfather and grandmother, Olha and Joaquín, who built the railways, their own parents who came from Earth on the jalopies on that one-way trip to Terminal…

Someone has to stay. To make sense of it all, catalogue the old photos.

Someone has to remember for the rest.

 

13.

You and me eating ice-cream at the Ayinde Oasis. I often wonder about the treats they have on Earth, where cows live. Our milk is made of soy and rice and coconuts. I have never tasted cow’s milk. It seems strange. We’d brought the ice cream with us, along with the picnic food. Do you remember the oasis? We only took you there once or twice, I think. I used to love them when I was younger, your father brought me to the Ayinde Oasis the first time, it lies almost two hundred klicks away from Port Jessup. Wild, left-alone biodomes scattered throughout the Outback, fed from ice water deposits deep underground. Plants grow free there. It was humid inside, the air buzzed with humming insects. It was thick with perfume: hibiscus, petunia, Rose of Sharon. Your father of course disappeared into the overgrowth, looking for some new strain of flower.

Some of the ice cream fell down your chin. You had a wobbly tooth, it would come out later, on the drive back along the lonely desert.

 

14.

A grainy photo of a trail of snailer caravans, silver against the setting sun, travelling in a line across the sand past the oasis.

 

15.

A lone robotnik trudges along the railway tracks in the distance, framed against the last of the dying light. I’m not sure what he is doing there, I often wonder, still, about who he was. Some of them have lived for centuries, if you can call it a life: old cyborged soldiers from the wars we no longer have. Is he metal detecting? Some of them do go out into the Outback, searching for old, buried things that fell from orbit centuries ago, that they can then exchange for cash. It’s a lonely life, I think. But maybe it’s just peaceful.

Do you feel that way some times, Helena? Is it full of solitude where you are, out there beyond the Oort, with only the promise of the stars for company?

I miss you.

It is a hard thing for a parent, to know they’ll never see their child again.

 

16.

This one is another of my grandfather Anton’s photos of dubious provenance, as my mother used to call them. I never saw it when he was alive, only when he died and we went through his few possessions to clear out the apartment for the next tenant. It was a Rainday when he died, a fine mist of water covered the streets of El Jem and the rose bushes outside the co-op building. Grandad looked so small and still on the single bed.

A ghost collector from the archives came. She knelt beside the bed, reached behind his head, lifted it gently, exposing the node entwined into the brain. She did something—I didn’t watch. When she was done the ghost had come out, a jumble of memories, stored information. Ghosts never made much sense.

“Do you want it decanted?” the ghost collector said. Some people put their ancestors’ ghosts into tiny physical robots that lived inside elaborate ghost houses, like back on old Earth. But my mother shook her head.

“The Public Heavens are fine,” she said.

The ghost collector nodded. Then she left quietly. It’s a quiet sort of business, I think.

Oh, the photo. Yes. This one’s a drone shot, taken from high overhead. It shows a tangled knot of railway tracks somewhere in the desert—somewhere as far from anywhere as anything can be. It has no real sense to it, either, this spider web of crisscrossed rails. It is as if every line ever laid had come here at one point, joined with the others and departed elsewhere. There is no station. No buildings, no people.

But there are trains.

They are from all over Mars. There are old Soviet red trains and the blue trains of the kibbutzim, there are inner-city trains that only run in Tong Yun and the express ones that go past Olympus Mons at enormous speeds, and the patient slow trains that stop at every tiny dome town out in the outback.

They’re all there.

It’s just a story, of course. The Convocation of the Trains. How once in a decade they abandon passengers and drivers alike and take off into the desert, to some secret place, to speak in the language only they know. What do they talk about? What do trains dream?

It’s just a story people tell.

 

17.

You and me at your father’s funeral. I don’t want to talk about that.

 

18.

You when you were just born, held in your father’s arms. He looks bewildered, doesn’t he? I sometimes think it’s the face all new fathers wear, until it just becomes a part of them.

 

19.

You, on your last day on Mars. The photo is in a small wooden frame, on my shelf, next to your grandma’s book of Stories from the Outback. You look so happy in the picture—nervous, too, I think. It hurts to look at it sometimes, that happiness you have on leaving. Sometimes when it rains, late at night, and only the whispers of the sprinklers in the dome fill the air, when I have the window open, and the smell of sage wafts in from the potted plants, I wonder—is it happiness at going, or happiness at leaving that you felt that day? I know, of course, that it’s the former, not the latter, and you are grown, and have your own life to lead. Right now, the Exodus ship you chose is leaving the solar system. I picture you just the way you were when you left. Your body lies in cryogenic sleep. By the time you wake up I will be nothing more than a blurry photograph like all the others. Mars will be changed. They’re trying to engineer the atmosphere to make it more like Earth. By the time you wake, what will you see? A new star, a new world? Will there be anything left back home, by then?

We have ants on Mars, and ants are a lot like humans. They, too, must spread out from their original home, make new nests, even wage war on others of their kind. What is it about us that does not allow us rest? That we must always go further?

Like ants we quest towards the distant stars.

Wherever you go, whenever you wake up to resume your life, will you remember us, and that I love you?

 

20.

A blackness of space, filled with the light of stars. Taken from somewhere in the Oort. The sun is only there as a somewhat brighter object in the field of vision. Mars is out there somewhere, too; Mars and Earth and all the other human worlds. But you can’t even see them anymore.

© 2026 Lavie Tidhar