Martian Heart by John Barnes (Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2011) opens on Mars with an old man talking to a botterogater (robot interrogator or interviewer) about his life. He begins by talking about his partner and later wife, Samantha, and tells how, as teenage vagrants in LA, they got picked up by the police. After that their options in this punitive future world were (a) twenty years in the military, (b) ten years in the “glowies,” (radioactive decontamination squads) or (c) going to Mars as settlers. They choose the latter option (after marrying to qualify) as the much smarter Samantha realises it is the only way they can stay together.
Most of the rest of the story tells of their time as Martian prospectors, an occupation that takes them to distant parts of Mars in the rover Goodspeed, until, eventually (spoiler), Samantha’s well-telegraphed heart problems (caused by the reduced Martian gravity that affects a substantial proportion of the new settlers) leads to her death. Before she dies she gets him to promise to cremate her—she doesn’t want to be buried in the freezing ground—and also that he will continue with his ongoing education (earlier on in the story he is illiterate, but she manages to cajole him to learn to read on the long trip out to Mars).
When he later crashes the rover trying to get back to base with her body it lands on its roof and damages the radio. He realises that he won’t be rescued, and so decides to use the remaining oxygen to burn the rover with her in it—that way he can keep at least one of his promises to her. He’s subsequently knocked out by the explosion, but a satellite detects the flash and the AI sends an auto-rocket to rescue him. He is later indentured for the cost of his recovery and treatment, but eventually buys his freedom, partly because of his continual program self-improvement. The final scenes show him having become vastly wealthy, and the founder of a huge Martian city called Samantha.
This may seem a relatively uncomplicated piece, but the pleasure is in its telling: the narrative is delivered by a man whose other half is obviously his better half (and who continuously works on his improvement); it is set in a frontier, Old West-like Mars, which is explored in the story; and the scene where he cremates his dead wife (and indeed the greater love story included in the piece) is affecting without being mawkish:
I carried Sam’s body into the oxygen storage, set her between two of the tanks, and hugged the body bag one more time. I don’t know if I was afraid she’d look awful, or afraid she would look alive and asleep, but I was afraid to unzip the bag.
I set the timer on a mining charge, put that on top of her, and piled the rest of the charges on top. My little pile of bombs filled most of the space between the two oxygen tanks. Then I wrestled four more tanks to lie on the heap crosswise and stacked flammable stuff from the kitchen like flour, sugar, cornmeal, and jugs of cooking oil on top of those, to make sure the fire burned long and hot enough.
My watch said I still had five minutes till the timer went off.
I still don’t know why I left the gig. I’d been planning to die there, cremated with Sam, but maybe I just wanted to see if I did the job right or something—as if I could try again, perhaps, if it didn’t work? Whatever the reason, I bounded away to what seemed like a reasonable distance.
I looked up; the stars were out. I wept so hard I feared I would miss seeing them in the blur. They were so beautiful, and it had been so long.
This is a pretty good old-school story that will appeal to lovers of mid to late 20th Century SF.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,650 words.