The First Day of Spring on Mars

Suri was eleven years old, and she had never once seen a plant grow in the ground.

She had been born on Mars, in Hope Station, a small colony of domes and tunnels at the edge of a wide red plain. Outside the windows, everything was the same color: red. Red rocks, red dust, red sky. The sun was small and far away, and the wind carried sand that hissed against the glass, day and night. Nothing grew out there. Nothing had ever grown out there, in all the millions of years the planet had been turning.

Inside, people grew food, but not the way they did on Earth. Suri had seen the hydroponic racks, where lettuce and beans hung in trays of water and pink light, their roots dangling in the air, never touching soil. It was clever. It was useful. But it was not the same, and Suri knew it, because she had watched the old films from Earth. She had seen forests. She had seen a field of grass moving in the wind. She had seen a child lie down in real soil under a real blue sky, and she had not understood, deep down, how such a thing could be real.