The Four Fingers of Death (31 page)

Jim and I were in the habit of taking the occasional afternoon constitutional, and after we finished wheeling the ultralight out of the
Excelsior
, and setting it up at a suitable distance from the encampment, we made for the lip of some distant barren sands. It was here that the two of us attempted to solve some of the problems in our own little world, the world of the
Excelsior
. If the wind was not blowing terribly, we could just follow our footsteps back, because footsteps were the exception rather than the rule here, and anyway there was the American flag, which had been hoisted on that first day and was still flying, only slightly tattered from the velocity at which the winds blew in this desolate place. We used it as a homing beacon.

“Jim,” I said.

“Don’t,” said he.

With helmets on. Via short-range walkie-talkie.

“I have to.”

“You do not.”

“I have to.”

“I beg of you.”

“Please,” I said. And then the words were out of my mouth, muffled only slightly by our Martian space suits. “Do you never think of me?”

“I wish there were some days when I didn’t have to.”

“You know what I’m getting at.” I gestured to the east, where Phobos was beginning her transit. “What is this place, Jim, but the place of loneliness? What am I meant to feel here besides loneliness? There’s nothing here! Anything we make here, we make ourselves. There’s nothing that we haven’t made, or carried here, and there’s nothing special that we’re going to make for a generation. It’s a landscape of scarcity. Paucity. Maybe I’m here because I didn’t live up to my potential back on the home planet, Jim, I’ll admit it. Maybe that is something I can do for humankind. I can come to one of the many planets that God evidently didn’t finish decorating, and I can work here, carve something out of the splendid barrenness. But does that mean that I have to give up on love? Jim? What did the heavy heart of planetary exile teach me? What has it taught you? Does it teach us to give up
wanting?
Does it teach you that a man is not a man? Or does it teach you that you are what you long for, no matter what the essence of that longing is, and that the constraints the home planet imposes on longing are not written in nature? I felt something back there, in the void between the planets, and it was like the icy exterior of my failed marriage and my desperation back on Earth were melting off of me, and I felt suddenly alive, however clumsy and awkward the whole thing was. Do you really mean to make out like it never happened at all, Jim? Can you really do that? Would you leave a man shivering in the night, and not even once try to beat back the subspace emanations of loneliness?”

“Enough!” Jim shouted, and I could see the fog in his helmet from the discomfort of it all. He grabbed me by the shoulder, and there we stood, far from home, in a place where, if we died, and it was reasonable to suppose we might, it could be decades before they found our skeletons. At last, Jim continued: “You don’t know what goes on in here, Jed! You don’t know what kinds of anguish I feel here. A man’s woe is his own even when he puts it into inadequate words. What happened up there, that night, well, it changed me. But not in the best ways. I feel like I’m breaking apart, because of it all. I feel like I can’t look at myself in the mirror and be sure that I’ll recognize the face that looks back at me. Every day I get a message from my kids, my boys and my little girl, I feel some stirring of such confusion in myself that I… I don’t know if I can… withstand this, Jed, this interplanetary me. My older boys got into a fight at the ice hockey rink yesterday. They didn’t start it, but they had to finish it, and they administered some exemplary kind of knockout blow to the attacker, and each of them was bloodied by the combat. I’m proud as hell of them. But would they be proud of what their father has done? Their father the first gay captain in space? Is what he’s done good for them, good for the home planet? They were the ones who suggested I come here. I did it to try to put the loss of their mother to rest. Did I do the right thing? Is this the right place for the likes of me? NASA can’t get ahold of us more than one day out of seven now, and we have begun forging a colony of our own. Without them. A good thing? Or a bad thing? Faced with these uncertainties, faced with the frailty of the Mars colony, Jed, what do I do about the carnal fire I feel when I think about you? You, Jed Richards. Should I just chase you around in the capsule, grab-assing, when every one of us is in danger of getting scurvy starting sometime next month when the vitamin C capsules run out? Will I still look attractive to you when my teeth start dropping out?

“Every time I have a randy thought, every time I feel that tug, I feel like I’m defaulting on my leadership responsibilities, I feel like I’m thinking only of myself, when I have so much else to think about. Do I have room in my heart for the kind of outlandish behavior we undertook up there, or is that just part of space itself, part of the voyage, not part of life here among the desperate few—”

And then, while he was in the middle of the thought, he tore himself from me violently, and standing some feet away, he flung off his helmet, and I heard the hiss of oxygen, and then there was a groan of such mortal intensity that I wondered if he didn’t rip himself apart from the inside as he did it, whether to wrestle me to the ground or to embrace me I didn’t know, not at first, but I cried out to tell him
not
to run that terrible risk. Still, there was no choice but to do the same, to remove my helmet. There we were, two oxygen-deprived, frostbitten men who loved each other. Two men who had been driven as far from the dictates of heterosexual civilization as anyone ever had been. All that needed to be done was to accept where we were and what we had between us. Here was my lover on his knees in the Martian desert, clutching my leg and sobbing, driven from all earthly human civilization. The crown so heavy on his fevered brow.

He gasped, “I have lost everything!”

“It’s not so,” I whispered, faint of breath. “We don’t ever have to be together again, if only I can know that you care. It’s enough, Jim. If I just know that we’re in this together, and that I’m not dreaming about what happened. That’s enough. What I want is to feel like I have given myself to something or someone of substance. We can do this together. We can do it.”

He collapsed onto his backside. And as if it would somehow convince him of the seriousness of the situation, he grabbed a fistful of Martian topsoil and watched the orange dust blow free of his glove. Then I helped him to his feet. And then, because we were already in danger from exposure and hypoxia, we put back on the helmets and trudged homeward.

February 11, 2026

The following dialogue has been taking place for ten days or so. On the bulletin board application on our clipboards. I have vacillated about uploading the file because of how incomplete the exchange is, but ultimately, I have decided that it’s a good example of the way life is lived on the Mars colony, as well as being an interesting document of the times, and so I include it today.

[email protected]
: Dad, I have a little time cuz the homework is done. I had to do a report on women in politics over the last hundred years. Women are making all these great strides because there are more of them in congress and stuff, but I think maybe some of them are making strides if they
don’t
go into politics. I mean, why would you bother? So, anyway, what’s up on Mars?

[email protected]
: Darling. Just seeing your handle on the computer log makes me want to cry. There’s so much back home I feel like I’m missing. Maybe that’s a defining feature of my time on Mars. Mars is where you go to miss out on things.

[email protected]
: You’re not missing much at all! A guy got killed playing X-treme lacrosse last night. A big head injury. And a governor of somewhere resigned after it came out he was trafficking in sex slaves. Someone tried to flatten Armenia with bombs last week. Can’t remember who.

[email protected]
: It’s you who I’m missing. I want to know everything. So tell me how much you’ve grown, what clothes you’re wearing. What the latest fashions are. What young people do about skin blemishes. And can you catalogue some of the slang for me?

[email protected]
: I think I’m the same size. I’m hoping that I kind of develop at least
some
boobs, you know? I mean, I don’t care if I have big gigantic breasts or anything. But at least some. By the way, I am kind of thinking that I might get nipple rings, which is maybe too much information. Mom says no. People are getting nipple rings that glow pale blue. If I pay with my own money from the job, she can’t complain.

[email protected]
: What job?

[email protected]
: Concessions at the gator refuge. I sit at this little booth. I watch when the little kids get this light in their eyes and come running over to the gift shop. I don’t understand why kids almost always want to see the toy animal as much as the real animal. Anyway, I get a lot of reading done at work. Space travel books. That’s what I like. By the way. The cool expression is “exploding viscera.”

[email protected]
: Space travel books?

[email protected]
: The kind where people sail out into space and never look back. Some of them are about Mars, I guess. But Mars, to me, it kind of feels like going to Greenland, or something. It’s not so strange and unusual, because Mars is actually very close. And you’re there. I’m more interested in speed-of-light type things.

[email protected]
: I could give you some recommendations. And I could tell you some more about what it’s like traveling in space. Do you want to know more about this? It’s like being stuck in the trunk of a Cadillac on your way to being rubbed out. The mobster drives you around for months. And you feel like you’re going to throw up or dump in your pants.

[email protected]
: Thanks for sharing! I go to the observatory, you know, at the university, and also NASA lets me come down there pretty often and I go to the control room. Maybe once a week, even tho it’s a longish drive. I look at the surface of the planet, and I look at the pictures everyone has taken. Then I feel a little less worried. Hey, what happened to your blog anyway?

[email protected]
: I’m writing this sentence at 4:00 A.M., my time, honey. I have the alarm working so anytime there’s a communication on the computer log, it toggles this strobe light, and then I wake up to write you and hopefully I don’t bother the others. I don’t want to miss a chance. By the way, we’re doing fine. The biggest danger is boredom. When someone drills into a rock and finds something besides lava, that’s a big day. Half the time we don’t know what we’re finding until we hear back from NASA. As you can imagine, we’re not always first to hear. Many times, I’ve had to learn about us by reading the digest of the NASA website, which they send along in the morning mail. Abu and Steve, for example, from the
Geronimo
, have apparently found another good way to create oxygen as a by-product of chemical reactions they’re doing with the reactor. This is good news for us, because the air is thin, and we don’t have a limitless supply of the stuff.

[email protected]
: Dad, I guess I did want to ask you about things I heard, because I guess people have been saying some things, and I don’t know what’s true.

[email protected]
: Like what? What are people saying?

[email protected]
: Some people were saying that NASA can’t control the Mars mission. You guys aren’t doing what you’re supposed to be doing, and they don’t know if you’re ever going to come back.