Chapter Text
6 Years Old
Mark Watney was 6 years old the first time he learned the sun was dying.
It was 1st grade. Ms. Robinson had called out to the class, “Circle Time,” even though at this point, nobody had sat in an actual circle since kindergarten. But circle time was circle time, and today's circle time had a picture book with a shiny cover, which automatically made it a good day.
The book was called “What's Happening to Our Sun?”
It had clearly been written by someone more concerned about getting the facts right over making the pictures pretty. The sun on the cover was a plain yellow circle. A thin dark smudge ran across it—like somebody had drawn the sun correctly and then let a little kid scribble a line through it with a marker.
"So," Ms. Robinson said, in the voice she used for reading time, careful and higher pitched, "Scientists found something a few years ago. We’re going to learn about it today. It's called astrophage. Can everybody say that?"
"As-tro-fayj," the room recited back, ragged and half-interested, the way 6 year olds said anything an adult asked them to repeat.
"Astrophage is a little, little living thing. Smaller than a germ. It lives on the sun, and it eats light."
Rowan, two seats over from Mark, made a face like he'd bitten a lemon. "That's not real. You can't eat light."
"Some things can," Ms. Robinson reminded him. "Plants do something a little like it—you remember, we talked about how leaves take in sunlight and turn it into food? Astrophage does something like that too. It's just, it does it a whole lot, all at once."
Mark, who had been mostly looking at the smudge on the cover, sat up abruptly.
He knew about leaves. He knew about leaves specifically! Better than almost anyone in the room, he would bet, because he had a whole shelf of dead leaves at home organized by shape that his mom kept threatening to throw out. He had a windowsill tomato plant that he watered on schedule always. And he had strong personal opinions about which houseplants were "trying" and which ones were "lazy."
So when Ms. Robinson said ‘eats light like a plant’, something in his head sat up along with the rest of him.
"But plants make stuff," Mark said, not raising his hand, because that was allowed with circle time. "Leaves eat light and then they make sugar, and the sugar's how they grow. Is that what the astro-thing does? Does it grow into a bigger plant?"
"That's a really good question." Ms. Robinson flipped to the next page, which showed a fuzzy microscope photo of something that looked, to Mark, very unimpressive—a blurry little smudge that really could've been anything. "But no, not exactly. Astrophage doesn't grow into a plant. It just—makes more of itself. A lot more. Really, really fast."
"Like when mold gets on bread," said a girl named Leila, wrinkling her nose.
"Kind of like that, yes."
Mark thought about the tomato plant. It had taken eleven weeks to make its first actual tomato, and he had documented every single one of those weeks in a notebook with a crayon drawing on the front that said PLANT FACTS in letters that got smaller as he ran out of room. Eleven weeks, for one tomato. And this thing—this astrophage—could apparently just keep going forever, making more of itself out of nothing but light. No soil, no water, no eleven weeks of him remembering to check it every morning before school.
That struck him, immediately and completely, as the single most amazing thing he had ever heard.
"So it's like the best plant ever," he said, excitement ringing in his voice. "It doesn't even need dirt!"
He almost missed his own next thought entirely, because Rowan had started quietly trying to see how far he could scoot his chair backward without Ms. Robinson noticing, and Mark spent a large number of seconds watching him instead of listening, before the plant thing caught back up with him all at once and he was snapped back into focus mode.
"Well," Ms. Robinson started, in the particular tone adults used right before they were about to explain why something wasn't as good as it sounded. Mark understood, dimly, that there was a "well" happening, an adult "well," the kind that usually meant the fun part of a fact was about to get a less fun part stapled onto it.
But she stopped there for a second, looking at the room. She looked at Rowan, who'd gone quiet, and Leila, who was picking at her shoelace instead of looking at the book, and a kid in the back who Mark was pretty sure had started crying without making any noise about it—and she seemed to decide the room had had enough "well" for one circle time.
"It's a very good question for later," she said instead. "Right now, what I want you to know is: scientists are already working on it. Really smart people, all over the world, are looking at astrophage very closely and figuring out everything about it, the same way you're figuring out everything about your tomato plant, Mark."
Mark liked that answer a lot.
He spent the rest of circle time, and most of the block building after it, thinking not about the smudge on the sun, which didn't mean anything to him yet, but about the astrophage itself—a thing that ate light and never stopped growing. That didn't need dirt or eleven weeks or a windowsill. That was, as far as he could tell from one blurry photo, playing the exact game of life his tomato plant was.
Except, it was winning.
⚘.⋆˚࿔
He asked his mom about it that night, at dinner, filled with the fervor inherent in a 6 year old who had found a new favorite fact and intended to extract every detail anyone would give him.
"Could I grow astrophage instead of tomatoes? Would it need a pot?"
His mom, who had come home from work with a tiredness in her shoulders that Mark did not yet have the vocabulary to identify as fear, looked at him for a second too long.
"No pot," she said finally. "It doesn't work like that, bud."
"Why not?"
"Because it's not really a plant. It just does one of the things plants do. That's different from being one."
Mark considered this like how he considered most things in the world—with mild skepticism, filed for later reexamination—and went back to his dinner. He was already composing, in his head, an addition to the PLANT FACTS notebook that he was fairly sure his teacher was going to have to help him spell.
He did not notice his mom watching him a while longer than the moment required, or the relief in her face at whatever it was she saw there. He was a kid who'd just heard the worst news of the century, but instead of feeling devastated, had filed it, cheerfully, under ‘impressed.’ Right next to eleven weeks and one tomato.
⚘.⋆˚࿔
His dad got home late that night, after Mark was technically supposed to be in bed. Undeterred, Mark ambushed him in the hallway in his pajamas to deliver the full report—astrophage, no pot required, better than a tomato plant.
He had all the urgency of a kid who has been sitting on a good fact for several hours and could not possibly be expected to sit on it any longer.
His dad crouched down to his height, still in his scrubs, and listened to the entire thing without once glancing at his watch, which Mark would only understand years later, in a different hallway, as its own kind of answer to a kid who didn't yet know he needed one.
"Sounds like you really covered the basics," his dad said when Mark finally ran out of astrophage facts. "Better than most of the news anchors did tonight, probably."
"Mom says it's not really a plant. It just does one of the things plants do."
"Your mom's usually right about that kind of thing." His dad ruffled his hair. "Go on, bud. Teeth, then bed. The sun'll still be there in the morning."
Mark hadn't thought to be worried about that detail at all until his dad said it.
For a moment, he felt a rapid wave of anxiety, but that was quickly washed away, with the total confidence of a six-year-old that his dad definitely wouldn't have said it if it wasn't true.
He thought about it once more that night, while brushing his teeth and looking at the poster taped crooked over his bed. It showed a rocket, striking with its red and white.
He'd found it folded up in the library's giveaway bin and begged his mom to let him keep it even after she'd gently explained that the mission on it wasn't a real mission anymore. And it hadn't been for a while.
Mark had kept it up anyway. He liked the rocket. Ms. Robinson said really smart people all over the world were looking at astrophage very closely, and Mark, spitting out his toothpaste, decided that if he got to be an astronaut when he grew up, he could go look at it even closer than that, close enough to actually see it.
Not just a blurry photo, but the real thing. Up close, the way he looked at his tomato plant every single morning. It seemed like the obvious next step.
He fell asleep thinking about it, pleased with the plan, and did not think about it again for exactly as long as it took for the following morning to arrive, handing him a brand new favorite fact to replace it.