The kids did not know what to make of Nour. The right half of her face was badly disfigured by a burn, and none of the muscles worked correctly on that side. The eye there was exposed only through a narrow slit of scar tissue, and when she spoke or frowned (she never smiled), only half of her mouth was involved. The left side of her face would have been handsome except that the expression it carried was one of arrogance. Or maybe it was defensiveness. She tended to look at the ground and was hesitant to make eye contact, but when she did, she looked fierce, like she had just been challenged. When she spoke, her voice was low and serious in tone. The kids found her a little scary.

“First things first,” said Nour, “I’m sure you all want to know about my face.”

None of the kids spoke. Of course they wanted to know about her face, but they weren’t going to say that out loud.

From Water: Generation Mars, Book Three. Available now at https://www.amazon.com/Water-Generation-Mars-Book-Three/dp/1733731067

Image: developmental concept art generated by AI with further tweaks of my own (please note: no AI was used in the actual content of the book)

Parents sometimes have moments in which they are caught speechless by a realization about the world as their child sees it. In this case, the realization was this: her daughter had never known water as anything beyond something to drink or to rinse off with in the shower. Cas wanted to know what it was like to have so much water available that you could jump into it, sink into it, be in it. This required a well-considered answer.

From Water: Generation Mars, Book Three. Available now at https://www.amazon.com/Water-Generation-Mars-Book-Three/dp/1733731067

Image: Modified from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_girl_in_a_swimming_pool_-_underwater.jpg (Reg Mckenna from UK, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ )

It’s important to remember that life, in the collective sense, is made up of an uncountable number of lives, in the individual sense. Two such were those of Cas, the first child born on Mars, and Ori, her little sister. These sisters, like all humans, required oxygen to breath. On Mars, much of that oxygen came from the ice the colonists mined. The body of each sister, like the bodies of all humans, was 60% water and required frequent hydration. On Mars, that hydration came from the ice the colonists mined. The sisters, like all life, were composed of the elements available in their environment. Mars was their home, and they were made of Mars.
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From Water: Generation Mars, Book Three. Available now at https://www.amazon.com/Water-Generation-Mars-Book-Three/dp/1733731067

Image: illustration by Luis Perez for Air: Generation Mars, Book One

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It is a truism that where life exists it will expand to use every resource available. Three and a half billion years later, back on Earth, life had left the oceans, evolved to exploit all the resources of the planet, and had been merrily going about doing so until the Earth had little more to give. Luckily, that life had also evolved into a form that no longer required a random collision to leave the surface of its planet. That life looked up and thought, “We could go out there. We should probably go out there.” So that life returned to Mars in machines of its own design, set up shop mining the frozen ancient water from whence it had originated, and began to build an existence for itself on this now strange and desolate planet of its birth.

Flirting with panspermia in Water: Generation Mars, Book Three. Available now at https://www.amazon.com/Water-Generation-Mars-Book-Three/dp/1733731067

Image: illustration by Luis Perez for Shelter: Generation Mars, Book Two

Available now!

Water: Generation Mars, Book Three is now available on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Water-Generation-Mars-Book-Three/dp/1733731067

*Available October 22 in print and on Kindle*

Water: Generation Mars, Book Three

Swimming on Mars? Not likely. There is water on Mars, but it is frozen solid beneath the surface. In book three, Water, the children are touring an abandoned ice mine from the colony’s early years when an unpredictable seismic event traps them in a dark and shifting labyrinth of ice. Escape will require resilience and sacrifice beyond anything they have experienced.

Kindle edition available for pre-order at a special price now at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CK6RLNTG

illustration: Luis Peres