The Four Fingers of Death (32 page)

[email protected]
: Who said that? Who told you that?

[email protected]
: One of the other kids.

[email protected]
: Which one?

[email protected]
: I guess he’s Debbie’s nephew or something. I’ve been calling him up some, trying to help him feel better about what happened, you know?

[email protected]
: Listen, Ginger, the thing I
can
tell you is that Mars is
not
just a distant outpost of Earth. It’s not just a rock that Earth is going to annex or that the NAFTA countries are going to annex. It’s not like if they annex it they’ll send a bunch of construction guys out (and a few hookers), and in eighteen months there will be golf courses. It’s not like that. Once you get here, once you go through the long journey, and you go through the experience of being separated from the home planet, you are
changed
, and you feel different. You feel, well, I guess you feel a little more free. What you find is that the freedom of this place, the blankness of this place, the clean slate of it, well, that’s what makes you feel differently. You feel like you are starting something new. And you feel that everything old and worn was kind of a mistake, and that if you have a chance to be part of what’s new, the society that is adapted to this place, to the severity of this place, then you don’t need all the mistakes of the past, the mistaken ways of doing things.

Let me put it another way. You know when you have a houseplant, a spider plant, let’s say, like that time we brought your spider plant from Michigan to Florida? Remember that the spider plant seemed to change shape a lot when it got to Florida? The leaves seemed denser, and it was sending off more shoots than before? That means that the spider plant is not the same as it was in Michigan. What it was in Michigan was a plant specifically adapted to that climate (and incidentally we
did
bring a spider plant to Mars, because they wanted to see how a common houseplant would do here). Now your spider plant is a Floridian spider plant, and even if it is not native to that place, it has adapted to the quality of light and water.

The same kind of thing is true of the human body after months of weightlessness. It’s different on Mars. But so is the human spirit. If I can use that term. So is human society, in fact, which is nothing more than a conglomeration of human psychologies. This doesn’t mean we have “gone native,” or have become “uncontrollable” and are running around in Martian loincloths. But, Ginger, when you start really experiencing life out in the universe, beyond the home planet, it’s life full of unpredictability, space-time curvature, and all of that. The reliable old truths about who humans are, and their relations to their bodies, these things become much more convoluted.

But I’m still your dad, and I still love you, and I miss you, and I’m not going to stay here on Mars forever, if staying here means I don’t get to see what new ghastly piercing you have perpetrated upon your body. However, it’s almost Martian dawn, and my pet moon, Phobos, is going over the lip of the horizon, and I better get some sleep if I’m going to have the energy to test the ultralight.

In the meantime, despite the great work Steve and Abu did extracting oxygen from the propellant stockpile, Steve has sunk into what Arnie is describing as a very serious clinical funk. I suppose I don’t trust the prevailing terminologies exactly, because they seem earthbound to me. Everyone here, to some degree, is struggling with feelings of misery about our lot. Abu has found that there’s some kind of rubbery silicone that is being produced as a by-product of the reactor and the propellant, and when he was through trucking spent fuel rods over to the fissure where we’re consigning them, he started trying to use the silicone goo to make Martian sculpture out there by the waste repository. Since then he’s spent a fair amount of time out in the desert, alone, erecting an army of these skinny, gooey-looking guys, as if to populate what is so unpopulated.

Maybe because Abu has become busy and, perhaps, a little tired of his suite mate, or more likely because his son, back on Earth, has had a bad reaction to a mild case of flesh-eating streptococcus, Steve just went into a serious tailspin. You’ll recall that this son had strep throat early in the mission, which resulted in some bad scarring and ongoing circulatory problems, and then a stint in the clinic resulted in an opportunistic germ. Apparently the boy infected a nurse, who didn’t have quite as easy a time. It’s really too unpleasant to go into. Steve obviously took it extremely hard that he wasn’t at home during this emergency. Arnie ordered him to sit under the sunlamps by the reactor, and to double the dose of daily SSRIs he’s taking in his fluids. (In fact, Arnie recommended this to everyone.) I don’t know how Jim felt about it, but the idea that the guys from the
Geronimo
weren’t doing well was, for me, a bad sign about our progress.

Similarly, Jim was spending a lot of time watching the rover on the radar screen. He honestly couldn’t figure out why Brandon hadn’t yet moved into the easternmost Valles Marineris. We’d tracked his movement over a few days, and we decided that maybe Brandon was just
afraid
to go to the canyon by himself, or perhaps had some reasonable hesitations about his project, what with the danger of wall collapses, avalanches, not to mention
M. thanatobacillus
itself. Or perhaps, Jim hypothesized to me and José, Brandon intended to remain within striking distance of the
Excelsior
. We had protective gear in our cargo bay. We had the ultralight. We had, via José, instructions on how to harvest the material. We had the best uplink with NASA. Jim felt we needed to keep a close watch on the encampment and its equipment. He radioed to the greenhouse and the reactor station and told them, as well, to lock everything down.

The situation was made even more complicated by the sudden presence in the Tharsis region of a small dust storm. Now, I think I have explained a bit about Martian dust storms. For example, it’s a lot worse trying to take off or land aircraft in them, and that was why our government launched various unmanned explorers over the years. Often, the explorers orbited the planet for months, waiting for the sandstorm season to come to an end. The storms have been hard to photograph, because hunks of rock blowing around are inimical to photosensitive equipment—no matter how compact and solid-state. In fact, our own mission was designed to avoid the worst of the sandstorms that usually occur in Martian autumn. We are supposed to be gone by then. Spring, however, since it is a season with much variation in temperature, can spawn some activity. Which is to say that Mars has weather just like Earth. As a result, we had an idea what we were in for when the sun rose one morning sheathed in a brown-and-orange mist.

The worst of it are the so-called dust devils. It’s not just that the wind whips up, and a lot of Martian detritus blows around, but you also get these tornadoes, with the traditional funnel clouds careening wildly across the Martian wastes, occasionally picking up heavier material, in just the way an earthly tornado would. We have seen from our few orbiting satellites that these dust devils sometimes transport old human space junk and deposit it hundreds of miles away. And you never know exactly which direction the funnel is going to go, either. It bloweth where it listeth.

I told José that we were going to have to get everything that was outside, the laundry line, some of the machine tools, even the ultralight, back into the
Excelsior
, and then we were going to have to drive over to the greenhouse, to help Laurie and Arnie reinforce the polymer exterior to make sure they didn’t start leaking oxygen or losing temperature. This would kill all the plants. It was a long day securing everything, just like during the Atlantic hurricane season, and just as with a hurricane, we named the storm. We named her April. She was the first named storm on Mars. By the way, Steve and Abu showed up a bit later, and it was true that Steve was not himself. He seemed fainthearted, ghostly, slow to action, slow to respond.

I suppose we should have expected that the storm would prove a harbinger of worse things. Isn’t there always some fell monstrosity that gets thrown up by these weather events? Think what happened with hurricanes of old, even in the past fifteen or twenty years in a period of heightened global hurricane activity. Think of the pressure exerted on coastal development by climatic change. But I guess I am referring more to the symbolic stuff that comes in a storm. If you think symbolically about it, you’d know that Brandon himself was going to turn up, that the storm
was
Brandon, somehow. The planet was using Brandon to show what it was hiding beneath its layers of sediment. Or at least this was what I thought about it later. Brandon was the interplanetary bringer of war, fighting back against a somewhat puny but determined Mars colony from planet Earth, the other seven of us. If we anthropomorphized the storm, it was maybe because we were waiting for Brandon.

After we helped the others prepare, the three of us shut ourselves into the
Excelsior
and waited. We had dinner as we did most nights. And then we played cards. José was complaining that he kept losing, and that the two of us were ganging up on him. He said this in a good-natured way, not like the José of old. It occurred to me, because there are idle moments in life when you think about these things, that perhaps the José of old just never would exist again. With a serious head injury, you get these alterations in personality. They’re just rarely this pleasant. But then I made note of an even more interesting hypothesis. What if, kids, José had
never injured his head at all?
What if José Rodrigues was looking for some graceful way out of the military-industrial straitjacket that NASA had fitted upon him? It was a straitjacket that other Mars mission sociopaths still seemed to feel they needed to wear, but maybe José had had an interplanetary change of heart, a space epiphany. It was possible this new José was the more genuine one. I didn’t say this aloud, not while beating him at cards. There were many more months to live together. Who knew how many?

We prepared for bed. Or at least Jim prepared for bed, because he always went to bed earliest, preferring to wake just as it was light. Like a monk. Jim had been complaining about sleep for some time, had begun relying on a certain sleep preparation, which I believed was going to run out before long. I was worried about him becoming habituated to the medication. He may have begun already, which would account, perhaps in part, for his short temper with me.

For example, he was prone to complaining about how I chewed my food. I had, at some point in my youth, taken to heart advice I’d read that suggested that you should chew every mouthful of food thirty-two times. I had lived some of my life on Earth in a careless way where this kind of advice was concerned. Because of the dearth of food we actually were permitted to consume on the Mars mission, I had begun counting, nearly obsessively, each and every mastication. I almost felt guilty, somehow, if I swallowed before I had chewed the proper number of times. Then, one day, in a whimsical mood, I’d made the mistake of boasting about this to Jim. Since then, he had watched me eat, when he could bring himself to do so, with ever increasing amounts of agitation. Apparently, he had started counting my mastications as well. His other complaint referred to the wounded expression he said I wore each night when he elected to go to sleep and to leave José and me to do as we wished. No wonder he resorted to sleep aids. On the night in question, Jim, perhaps by reason of narcotics, was soon snoring the delightful little rasps that were his nocturnal communication.

An hour or so later, after I had written my nightly bulletin post to Ginger and read a little bit of Marcus Aurelius, I found myself so drowsy that I fell asleep with my cabin suit still on, reading glasses still pinched onto my nose, having failed to brush my teeth, which was something I had started to fail to do, in the past weeks, because of the scurvy that was commencing to afflict me. Once your teeth start becoming loose, who gives a royal shit about them? Unless Arnie was going to give me some of the green peppers he was hiding away, I was just going to lose some of my teeth, and that would be that!

The light went off down in the cargo bay, and then night was upon us. The Martian night, which by virtue of the lack of streetlamps and other light pollutants was of a fearsome intensity. We could hear the wind outside the
Excelsior
, in our dreamless and lonely states of unconsciousness, and we could hear the sand pelting the sides of the capsule, drifts of it accumulating. Or that is how I’m reconstructing it, since I was already asleep.