By Mike Muzzy · © 2026 Mike Muzzy. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

MARKET DAY

Chinatown, early 1981

The first market on Mars violated six regulations and improved morale by twenty per cent.

The percentage came from Morel and therefore had no scientific basis.

It began in Chinatown on a rest evening.

People had accumulated things.

Personal cargo allowances were small, which made every unnecessary object valuable. Books changed hands. Music tapes circulated. Coffee, tea, spices and sweets became currencies more reliable than money.

A Japanese technician traded a cassette recording for two packets of Soviet chocolate.

A French engineer traded wine for a hand-carved chess set made from scrap polymer.

Alina sold nothing but exchanged herbs for coffee.

Valdés arrived carrying a paperback western.

Morel looked at it.

“You brought cowboy books to Mars?”

“They were good company on the crossing.”

“That is not an explanation.”

“Read one. Then tell me.”

The market became regular.

Chinatown, early 1981. The shared meals had acquired a musical gathering of their own.

One of those places began with an empty space beside Zhou's cooking table.

On a rest evening, the dishes were finished and nobody wanted to leave. A freight scheduler had brought a guitar. An electronics technician had a small keyboard that spent most of its life under her bunk. Someone asked whether they intended to carry the instruments all evening or use them.

They played sitting down. The first song was uneven. The second found its rhythm. People who had been talking at the tables began listening.

The singer was Mason Reed. The keyboard player was Élise Laurent. Two colleagues joined them with what they had brought from their quarters, and before the evening ended the room had heard an early version of the band that would call itself Wayfarer.

Morel stood behind the last row holding a cup.

“We should do this again.”

“We have shifts,” Zhou said.

“Everybody has shifts.”

“Then everybody needs to know when.”

She tore the blank end from a packing list and put it on the table. Next rest evening. After the maintenance handover. No performance while a safety announcement was being made.

Morel added a line beneath it.

ANYONE MAY TRY.

A communications technician read the notice and offered a spare public-address microphone. It was ordinary equipment, with an inspected cable and a plug that fitted the approved socket. Li insisted on that last part.

The microphone arrived a week later. Its first noise was a howl that made two men reach instinctively toward their ears. The technician moved the speaker, lowered the gain and gave Morel a look.

“Keep it out of the speaker's line.”

Morel held it at arm's length.

“Is this far enough?”

“From you? We will find out.”

That first open-mic night had no stage. A strip of tape marked the place where a performer could stand without obstructing the kitchen. Five names went onto Zhou's list. One man erased his before his turn. Another read a poem in Russian while Han listened, catching a few words she had learned from the power crew.

Wayfarer played last. Their first song at Chinatown's first open mic was called We Built This World.

Mason had almost left it in his quarters.

He had started writing it after a freight shift that ended with two pallets in the wrong bay and a furious argument over who had authorised the move. Outside the window, men were fixing a section of corridor they had already fixed once. Someone said the colony looked finished in the photographs sent to Earth.

Mason had looked at the men beyond the glass.

Finished was a curious word for a place where a broken seal could still decide whether there would be a tomorrow.

The first page had been an angry one. Élise read it during a rehearsal and put it down beside her keyboard.

“You have written a complaint,” she said.

“It was a long shift.”

“I know. I worked it. What happened after the complaint?”

They had gone back out. They had shifted the pallets, found the faulty coupling and completed the repair.

“Write that part,” she said.

He did. Leon found a guitar figure that seemed to lean forward even when played quietly. Tomás worked out a beat on a practice pad, keeping the accents where boots met the floor. Élise laid a broad keyboard line over them. In the maintenance room it sounded too large for the space. Through the thin wall, somebody knocked.

They stopped.

“Again,” came a voice from the other side.

Now Mason stood on Zhou's strip of tape, looking at people who had spent their day measuring shortages. Some still wore work trousers stained at the knees. Li Wen sat near the wall. Han had stayed after the poem. A woman from agricultural maintenance was dividing the last of her supper with a colleague.

Mason glanced at Élise. She lifted her hands.

The opening chord spread through the small room. Leon answered it with the guitar figure. Tomás brought in the beat, firm enough to make a loose spoon tremble against the edge of a bowl.

Zhou turned away from her hot plate.

It was louder than the music they had played between shifts, but the equipment stayed within its permitted load. Élise had checked that twice. What made it seem enormous was the confidence of it. The tune kept rising. Every time Mason appeared to have reached its limit, the keyboard opened another space above him.

People near the door stopped talking.

He sang to the back of the room. The words came from repairs, freight lists and windows that showed bare ground where somebody had promised there would be streets. They gave the work its proper weight. The chorus made room for all the people who had carried it.

At the first chorus, a mechanic beside Li Wen put his bowl down.

At the second, he joined in.

He had only caught part of the words. The woman from agricultural maintenance supplied the rest. A voice near the doorway found the melody, followed by another from the table beneath the inspection notice.

By the final chorus, Mason could hear the room over his own voice.

Some accents changed the vowels. A few people came in late. Han remained seated, watching a Soviet fitter sing beside a Chinese toolmaker. The fitter struck the table in time. The toolmaker moved a bowl out of his way without missing a beat.

Mason looked at Leon. The guitarist was grinning.

They ended together. For a moment the ventilation fans were the loudest thing in Chinatown.

Then the room broke loose.

Hands hit tabletops. Someone whistled hard enough to make Zhou wince. Li Wen rose to steady the wobbling table as three people beat against it. A man at the door was asking the title before the applause had finished.

“We Built This World,” Mason said.

“Play it again.”

“We have another—”

“Afterwards. That one again.”

Élise looked at the kitchen clock. Zhou waved her on.

The second time, people stood. Those at the rear climbed carefully onto a low storage bench until Zhou ordered two of them down. The chorus arrived without Mason having to carry it there. He sang anyway, feeling the force of the room return through the microphone.

They had brought a new song to an open mic. By the end of its second performance, the audience was treating it as something it already owned.

The next morning, Mason heard it in the cargo bay.

Benches and keyboards were gone. A fitter was whistling Leon's opening figure while waiting for a pressure check. Two people farther along the corridor argued over a line they remembered differently. By midday a handwritten request had reached the workshop: would Wayfarer play the song at the next gathering, and could someone please copy out the words?

Mason took the request to Élise.

“I thought we might change the second verse.”

“You can try,” she said. “You will have to tell them.”

Within days, the chorus had reached crews who had never fitted into Zhou's room. People learned it from colleagues. Someone carried a copied lyric into the Soviet dome. A machinist pinned another beside a shift roster. It travelled ahead of any good recording, altered by memory and made recognisable by the energy that had first lifted a workshop full of tired people to their feet.

There was no vote conducted at a lectern. Whenever people were offered a choice, they asked for the same song.

For a time, officers called it the unofficial colony anthem. The distinction became difficult to maintain when a gathering could hardly end without it. Before the civilian launch that April, the words We Built This World appeared on a ceremony programme beside the instruction COLONY ANTHEM. The programme gave a name to a decision Chinatown had already made.

At that first open mic, nobody knew what a later programme would call it.

They knew they wanted to hear it again.

There were too few portions of workshop rice to feed everyone. Most of the supper still came from rations. Zhou combined them with a little of the new crop, properly cooked soybeans and whatever flavour could be persuaded out of the permitted packets. The meal tasted larger than its ingredients.

At the end of the evening, people asked when the next one would be.

Zhou pointed at the notice.

“Next week.”

The date went onto a maintenance board. A room used for machining during the day had acquired an appointment people looked forward to.

The microphone gave it a weekly centre.

By the second open-mic evening, the notice outside Zhou’s improvised kitchen had acquired an instruction beneath the time:

BRING YOUR RATION. WE WILL SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE.

People arrived with packets held like admission tickets. Some carried meat stews. Others brought vegetable mixes, plain biscuits or powdered ingredients they had stopped opening unless obliged. Zhou sorted them on a clean table while Cao wrote names against the containers.

Nobody surrendered an entire week's food. Nobody was allowed to walk away hungry because the cooking experiment had disappointed. It was one evening's meal, pooled by agreement, with the supplements weighed before the pans went on.

The workshop rice was still scarce. A little went into each pan, with reserved seed kept well away from the kitchen. The soybeans were cooked thoroughly; some became a coarse bean mash with oil and seasoning. Zhou's attempts at pressed bean curd had produced one promising block and an earlier disaster she would not discuss. The promising block was cut into thin pieces so more people could try it.

Two machinists joined her behind the table. Their working hands could judge a hot handle, divide a portion evenly and detect the instant something began to stick. That did not make them cooks. Practice, argument and a refusal to serve their early failures did.

A ration labelled BEEF AND VEGETABLES emerged from the pan with crisp edges, scallion and a sharpness Zhou had extracted from a permitted flavour packet. A bland soy mixture acquired heat and colour. Crumbled biscuits became a topping someone requested again before finishing the first bowl.

Morel inspected his portion.

“I recognise the packet.”

“You should,” Zhou said. “You brought it.”

“I do not recognise the dinner.”

“Then eat while it is hot.”

Sadie arrived with Rosa and Ben. Luc followed carrying four cups because he believed an evening out should involve as little queuing as possible.

She had expected a concert. She found a workshop rearranged by people who had decided, for a few hours, to use it differently. Finished components were covered. The floor had been cleaned. Crate tables filled the safe space between the marked aisles. Lanterns shifted gently in the ventilation.

Someone offered her a seat before asking her job.

“Arrivals,” she said.

The man nodded.

“Then you know when the missing things are coming.”

“Not always.”

“You will fit in.”

She smiled despite herself.

Wayfarer played after three other performers. Élise tested a chord while Mason adjusted his guitar strap. Their instruments looked familiar enough to belong on Earth. The sound reached Sadie before the room did.

She had sung through a spacecraft bulkhead and into the silence of a room where her parents no longer came downstairs. Here people sang back.

They opened with We Built This World. Its first-night audience had already taught the chorus to people who had missed that evening. Sadie heard voices joining from the kitchen before she knew the words herself. Mason forgot part of a verse. Someone near the kitchen supplied it, incorrectly. He laughed, found the line and went on.

Sadie watched that more closely than she watched his hands.

A mistake had happened in front of everybody. The song had survived.

At the desk the next morning, Rosa asked whether she had enjoyed it.

Sadie nodded.

“You went very quiet.”

“I was listening.”

“You sing, don't you?”

Sadie stopped aligning the forms.

“Sometimes.”

Rosa did not press. She left the next week's notice beside the roster.

• • •

For the third night, Zhou made a proper list.

Names, equipment, approximate length. Performers who required more than one power socket spoke to the technician first. The kitchen closed its noisy preparation before the first turn. A safety call stopped everything, including applause.

The improvements were small. They made the room feel as if somebody expected it to happen again.

Sadie wrote her name at the bottom.

Then she stood looking at it.

Zhou came out with a dishcloth.

“Would you like to move higher?”

“No.”

“Good. That is less work.”

She went back into the kitchen. Sadie had been prepared for questions about her age, her experience or what she intended to sing. Being accepted without any of them was unexpectedly frightening.

She practised in her room after study. Evelyn listened through the door until Sadie noticed the shadow beneath it.

“You can come in.”

Her aunt did.

“Is it all right?” Sadie asked.

“It is your song to sing.”

“That is not an answer.”

Evelyn sat down.

“It is good. You already know that. You want me to tell you nothing can go wrong.”

Sadie touched the corner of the photograph beside the bunk.

“I want them to stay.”

The sentence meant the audience. It meant somebody else too.

Evelyn took her hand.

“Finish the song,” she said. “Give them the chance.”

On the night, Sadie helped at Arrivals until a delayed cargo transfer was complete. Luc checked the last restraint himself and sent her away before she could find another reason to remain.

At Chinatown she ate three mouthfuls, decided she could manage no more and pushed the bowl toward Ben. He moved it back.

“It will wait.”

Wayfarer's keyboard stood at the edge of the little performance area. Élise had agreed to accompany her after a brief rehearsal. Nothing elaborate. The chords Sadie knew, played quietly enough for her to find her own way through.

When Zhou called her name, the room looked larger than it had from the table.

Sadie stepped across the tape.

Evelyn sat near the back in a clean laboratory shirt. Rosa had moved closer to the front. Ben was still beside the cooling bowl.

Sadie adjusted the microphone too low, corrected it and heard her own breathing through the speaker.

For one second, she wanted the terminal desk. The forms there could be put in order.

Élise played the opening.

Sadie began.

The first line was smaller than she intended. The next carried. By the end of the verse, the conversation beside the tea counter had stopped.

She did not watch her aunt. She looked above the nearest heads and sang the song she had learned when getting through a verse had been a week's achievement.

There were no special lights. A pump started in the next module. Somebody's cup touched a table. She heard all of it, and kept singing.

When the last chord ended, the room waited just long enough for her to fear that she had misunderstood everything.

Then the applause came.

Zhou leaned out from behind the kitchen table.

“Come back next week.”

Sadie looked at her.

It was an invitation, spoken as if the matter had been decided.

She nodded before she could make it complicated.

• • •

By the fourth evening, someone had made a microphone stand from serviceable noncritical stock. The base was broad enough not to tip when a nervous performer caught the cable. Cao had rounded every edge and painted a white mark where it should stand.

Sadie no longer went last. Two technicians from the first mining squad brought instruments. They had begun playing together with the other men and women whose equipment they maintained. Their set was loud enough for Zhou to tap the sound technician on the shoulder. The volume came down. The determination did not. The four would eventually call themselves Voltage.

A Russian electrician sang. A Chinese machinist recited words most of the room did not understand until Li translated the joke at the end. Luc attempted a song he knew from home, abandoned the second verse and received enough encouragement to finish badly.

Sadie returned to the microphone. This time she could look at the people nearest her without losing the line.

Afterwards, a worker asked when she would sing again. He did not ask how a seventeen-year-old had reached Mars. For the length of that conversation, she was simply the singer he had enjoyed.

The meals had become part of the appointment. People brought their rations and found out what the machinists behind the pans could do with them. A spoonful of locally grown rice, properly cooked beans and flavours rescued from dull packets turned identical supplies into dinners worth discussing on the next shift.

Shaw attended the fourth night after inspecting the kitchen's electrical record. She stayed through Sadie's song and the return of Wayfarer.

At the end, Zhou put a bowl in front of her.

“You have checked the sockets,” she said. “Now check this.”

Shaw ate.

“The aisle needs another clear mark.”

“We will paint it.”

“And the growing-room record is late.”

“Cao will bring it tomorrow.”

Shaw took another mouthful.

“Same time next week?”

“Yes.”

On Mars, a successful unofficial thing did not become invisible to the rules. The rules had to find a way to accommodate it.

The seed room stayed. The kitchen stayed. The microphone came out once a week.

On Lunar New Year, someone persuaded Shaw to authorize four hours of reduced nonessential work.

She arrived expecting a small meal.

She found half the colony there.

Paper lanterns hung from cable trays. Tables had been made from shipping crates. Alina had surrendered vegetables from the agricultural dome. Morel had found wine. Han was losing badly at a game she claimed not to understand.

Valdés stood beside Shaw.

“Still want the name removed?”

She watched a Soviet electrician trying to use chopsticks.

“No.”

“What changed?”

“Nothing.”

She accepted a cup of tea.

“Put it on the official map.”

By then, the name had been in use for months. The celebration made its place on the official map harder to dispute.

Nobody charged rent because nobody owned the floor.

That raised the next legal question.

Could civilians operate businesses on neutral Martian territory?

The charter committee on Earth produced seventeen pages.

Chinatown produced tea.

The tea won.

Shaw tolerated the market as long as nothing interfered with mission supplies, safety equipment or duty schedules.

Then someone attempted to trade a spare pressure sensor.

She shut the market for a week.

When it reopened, a handwritten sign appeared:

NO LIFE SUPPORT PARTS.

NO MEDICAL SUPPLIES.

NO PRESSURE HARDWARE.

NO ARGUMENTS WITH COLONEL SHAW.

Shaw read the last line.

“Who wrote this?”

Nobody answered.

She left it.

The market mattered because it was voluntary.

People gathered there because they wanted to, as they had begun doing over shared meals and music.

The colony had created informal commerce before the main civilian settler group arrived.

Earth lawyers took note.