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A Novel
by Joe Mungo Reed
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Mum knows that I like to hear about Larry, because when I was a small child I used to ask about him often, as well as about Granddad, who needed to be left behind because of the unforeseen rapidity of the Terrestrial Collapse and the limited capacity of the transports. Mum brings the noodles to the table, and I push the screen away and take up my ortho-fork. "What did Larry like to do?" I say.
Mum thinks. "He liked to run and smell and lick, I suppose. And the Colony maybe wasn't the best place to do any of those things, so perhaps even before the end bringing him here was a mistake."
"He didn't like to just sit?"
She lifts noodles with her chopsticks, swallows a mouthful and thinks. "He did like to sleep," she says. "But dogs are physical creatures. They need to run."
"Yes."
She looks at me, and I have the familiar feeling that I often have with Mum that I know what she is thinking. She is worrying that her assertion that running is so important to a dog might be offensive to her son who cannot run naturally. I am not offended, though I am well aware that the problems of my generation discomfort our parents, however much they might deny this. I would prefer, actually, that they spoke of it all more clearly, rather than avoiding the subject. I like to be direct, as is probably obvious.
Because there is a silence, I ask our OS to play music.
"Not this," says Mum. I've been listening to experimental Terrestrial music recently, and Mum dislikes it, says it sounds like a factory.
"Change, please," I say in my OS voice. Then I say, "This is better?"
She says, "Thanks." Then she says, "Sorry, R, it's just ..."
"You don't like it as much as I do?" I say.
"I suppose so."
I twist my noodles with my ortho-fork. "Like Rute noodles ..." I say.
She laughs. "I don't know whether to pity you for never having tasted food from Home, or whether to envy the fact you have nothing to compare this against." It's a joke, of course, based on the well-known fact that Homers like Mum would prefer the food from Earth, but it's also a little disrespectful to all those people who worked so hard to find a way to grow Rute efficiently in the Martian regolith, and all the folk who developed processes to turn this Rute into noodles, and breads, and chewy buns. I look at the OS receiver, wonder what the ArtInt is making of this. I suspect that her flat sarcasm slips by the system, and anyway her work is Category One, meaning that she is highly unlikely to be flagged for Attitude Assessment and potential Downrating. Still, to compensate, I say that Rute is crucial to our survival on the planet, and that I like it, and that anyway it's certainly better than eating nothing at all, which is really the only other option when you think about it, given the Terrestrial Collapse, and the difficulty of growing Legacy Foodstuffs here. Mum listens to this and her expression is momentarily brittle, but then she softens her eyes and nods and says that of course I'm right, and she shouldn't have made her silly joke, and she reaches across the table and touches my hand.
Mum is Category One because of her work on the Stellar8Rs, without which life here would be impossible. She doesn't like to talk about this, but one of the teachers at my school explained it to me, amazed that I didn't know that it was Mum who designed the first mini-loop system. That was why her picture was on display on Pioneers' Day. Without her, our teacher Yao said, we'd be shivering on this rock with nothing. Life in the Colony is hard and requires good attitude and energy. Lots of energy. On Home, maybe, there was just water sitting in pools, waiting for people, and food just grew and there was air to breathe, and a temperate atmosphere. But here we need to use so much power to get our water and our food, and to make the very air we need, and to warm us in the long nights and to cool us in the blazing days. Without Mum's systems, we would have managed only subsistence, if anything. On Home, they never managed such power. It is Mum's designs that allow us to live fulfilling lives here, and to feel assured that with terraforming we will find a way back to an easy self-regulating biosphere like the one which existed on Home, and which so many people back in Terrestrial History were so complacent about. You would expect Mum to be proud, but she is often regretful. She can be sad (though it is a sadness that I do not think others notice so easily, a sadness she carries lightly, that lives around the corners of her eyes).
Excerpted from Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed. Copyright © 2025 by Joe Mungo Reed. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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