The Four Fingers of Death (35 page)

Now that I was thinking about it, there may have been a third explanatory possibility, besides the two I’ve mentioned; maybe it was not the case that Brandon had
interplanetary disinhibitory disorder;
maybe it was not the case that he suffered the effects of his exposure to
M. thanatobacillus
, assuming José was right and such a bacterium even existed farther down in the Martian geological strata.

Maybe José got killed so that he’d keep his mouth shut.

March 12, 2026

To: The entire Martian Community

From: Jim Rose

Re: A Survey of Martian Economics

Be it known, fellow Martians, that the time has come for choosing! For every new civilization, no matter how fragile, no matter how young, how untimely birthed from the womb of the mother planet, there comes the moment in which this newly birthed society must determine for itself the specifics of its ideology. Fellow Martians, it is nearly six months now since first we set out on our long journey. How well we know the reasons and motives that first launched us into the milky oblivion of the innumerable stars! We know these reasons and motives because they were so often bandied about in the press and on television and across the web of our birth culture. We know the ideals to which the birth culture aspired, and we know the darker ways in which its needs oppress us! Fellow Martians, we know the mother planet is an angry and capricious mistress! We know that even at this distance she would command our every step, know every sentence that we utter, circumscribe every afternoon of the Martian year we are intended to spend here! And for what? For profit, fellow Martians, all for profit!

When they see Mars, as they do through the cameras that we have installed for them, or through the reports that we write down for them, or from the microphones that are even affixed to the jumpsuits we are wearing at this very moment, they do so through terms and according to multinational ideologies that were constructed and designed for that world. They preach freedom while requiring servitude, fellow Martians! They preach sacrifice and selflessness while underwriting the mission with geological riches and the avarice such a thing entails. They preach tolerance while practicing war, and then they command our allegiance!

What would it mean to be truly free on the Red Planet, fellow Martians? We have seen the worst that freedom brings, when one of our number runs amok and sacrifices another of our beloved brothers! Freedom, when it is simply the freedom to be a shareholder in a mercantile entity that is no longer beholden to any government, is not freedom! It is a form of interstellar slavery! Martian freedom must be designed on Mars, by Martians, for Martians, and it must reflect the difficulty of our terrain, the modesty of our resources, and the sense of community that we bring to the project of establishing a new human civilization! Think of what the revolutionaries of our own planet accomplished, in France, the United States, Bali, Kazakhstan. Mars must reject Earth in exactly these ways!

And so, fellow Martians, I bring to you today the first of my meditations on the history and economics of the Martian colony. By the power vested in me at the Greenhouse dinner of January seventh, two thousand and twenty-six, I hereby declare the socialization of and communal ownership of all the infrastructure on the planet Mars. I hereby declare that private property, the antagonist of any community in the process of finding its footing, is abolished. I declare that while the trinkets and memorabilia of our old lives are useful as mementos, we hold that the majority of our lives are lived in this community, with these people, and as such, the objects that pass between people are held to be our common property. Among this common property will be the electrical power generated by all of us, among this common property will be the food that we grow in or out of our greenhouse, among this common property will be the literary accounts that we generate in this place for sale back on the mother planet, in whatever form these sales might take place, a portion of which will always be kicked into a common kitty by the author of these works, such as the author of this memo on Martian property rights. Any minerals that we locate here, including diamonds, platinum, gold, and any other valuable minerals, will be the common property of the Martian colony. Any film rights that we sell, pursuant to our stories on the planet Mars, will be held to be common property, in which we all share equally. Children born in the Martian colony will be considered the nieces and nephews of all adults in the Martian colony. Dinner will be cooked serially by all Martian adults, on a rotating basis, unless the colony specifically decides to cancel dinner plans. From each, therefore, according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

We hold that these principles of common trust are based upon our lives on this planet thus far, and that they are therefore organic to our experiences as Martians. They conform to the principles of our Mars First! political entity, which, at the present time, is the only political party on the planet Mars. This is not to say that Mars First! is averse to sharing power with any other parties that are liable to emerge at some future date. We are against military actions, except when we understand a need to defend ourselves and our common property. We have no prison and we have no death penalty. Public service on the planet Mars is to be carried out on a rotating basis, and according to rigorous standards of public service. When our term is over we shall hand over the reins of power to the next volunteer or group of volunteers.

These are our beliefs, which we hold to be self-evident, until such time as we may find reason to amend them! Mars first! Mars always and ever!

How, you might ask, did Jim Rose come to author these memorable lines, which have already gone down in the history of the Mars colony as the first of our constitutional documents? In the weeks after José’s murder, the remaining members of the Mars colony spiraled further down into the quiescent pall I’ve described above. Abu was working on his sculptures, out in back of the generating plant. Laurie (who was, as I’ve said, beginning to show) and Arnie retreated into their botanical endeavors, almost always finding reasons to cancel dinner on us and leave us to fend for ourselves with the rations we had remaining. Steve apparently stayed in his bunk four or five days at a time. Then there were Jim and me.

What Jim decided to do, in lieu of pursuing much of a relationship with me, was go out and see the world. I think it was only three or four days after Brandon’s rampage that I helped him to haul the ultralight out of the
Excelsior
again, in order to get the thing up and running. Jim was handy with all machineries, and as I have said, he was a very good pilot. We used the onboard hydraulics to lower gently the ultralight to the floor of the planet, and then Jim set about trying to clear enough rubble out of the way that he might have a reasonable runway for the craft.

I should point out that in the days that had intervened, I, for one, continued to track Brandon, using the device that was affixed to his rover. It was at this point that he did seem, at last, to descend into the mouth of the Valles Marineris, that immense geological formation, no doubt in the process exploring for water, life, bacteria, and all the ready-to-be-plundered resources that the mother planet was happy to have shipped back to her. Brandon’s movements, as I conceived of them from the
Excelsior
, were anything but faint of heart. It was as if, by
neutralizing
José, he had, indeed, surmounted the biggest of his problems, and was now safely at work on a task ordered directly from the USA. His industry suggested that we might, at some point, have the element of surprise where Brandon was concerned.

Jim wanted to keep it this way. But he still needed to be certain that the ultralight was mission ready, and that he’d be able to land it on the rocky terrain near the canyon without turning it into a pile of scrap. And so he resolved to set off in a southerly direction. A curious way to go, kids, because the south, like the poles, to which we would not have access because of the distance, just didn’t have much to offer, besides some dry ice. Not like the outflow channels at the eastern end of Valles Marineris, where Brandon had lately pitched his camp. Nevertheless, the impact basin nearby, Argyre, also presented, according to geologists on the home planet, the great likelihood of water ice. And any trip to Argyre kept us far away from Brandon.

It was a risk to fly the craft in a direction where none of us could help Jim in the event of difficulty. And NASA would have been the first to advise against it, had we been in a mood to listen to their point of view (since their unpleasant broadcast memorial to José, which had run on the web in the days after his demise). They were no longer telling us what to do and were beginning to recognize, I think, that we had long ago assumed responsibility for ourselves. We offered very little in the way of specifics to Mission Control.

It may have been true that Jim Rose
wanted
the emptiness and the experience of tundra. The Martian emptiness was more empty than any other emptiness. I made Jim promise to take a video camera, however, in case he resolved some of the scientific problems that were much on our minds.

I met him by the aircraft, and in the new post-sentimental environment occupied by the inhabitants of the
Excelsior
, I offered him the meal I had packed, which was some repulsive mixture of cream cheese, freeze-dried olive paste, candy bars, and a bottle of water, not something, I suppose, that he would like, with his finicky tastes, but food nonetheless. I advised against eating it all at once.

“And don’t forget the video.”

It was early morning, and he would have the hazy sun on his left as he flew south.

“I won’t. And you’re going to continue to keep an eye on Brandon.”

I nodded, withdrawing slightly. Perhaps I was right to do so. Maybe I knew the burden that Jim carried with him on that trip, in which he became the fulcrum for all that would happen on Mars in the future, the Mars of your generation, the Mars to come. Maybe I knew, likewise, that it wasn’t likely that Brandon was just going to give up harrowing the rest of us. Nor was it the case that
M. thanatobacillus
, once exposed by José, was going back into its hiding place beneath the surface of the interplanetary imagination.

There was no wind. Jim managed, despite a few remaining boulders on our makeshift runway, to get the ultralight aloft, and because we had left it out for a day or so, there was enough juice in the solar cells for him to make the trip with minimal expenditure of solid fuel. He banked left, out above the dunes, as though surfing on their crests. I don’t know how far off, because distances were lost to me. Then he headed out of my view, bound for the Argyre Basin.

The ultralight was equipped with a camera too, so as long as he was near enough to transmit to the little broadcasting antenna we’d erected on the roof of the
Excelsior
, he could send back fuzzy real-time footage of the terrain beneath him. Though I had seen Mars from above, as had all of us, it had been some time since the landing, and being elevated enough to look beyond the lip of the horizon was glorious and implicitly hazardous. What looked unvarying at first sight, the ferrous red and battleship gray of the surface, had grown in our time here much more complicated. There were all manner of strange geological formulations passing beneath Jim. I watched until the transmission began to break up, until grids of digital static broke through it and he was gone.

What we now know, kids, is that this was the moment in the wilderness when Jim Rose, free of the shackles of his fellow Martians, had the experience of being one with the new planet. This was the moment. He’d been flying for a couple of hours, as I understand it, before he saw the impact basin beneath him, the collapsed wall on the north side that was said to be the route through which the Argyre emptied its primordial flood upon the lowlands. We now know that Jim piloted his ultralight just south of the collapsed wall, and finding that the land was smoother here than elsewhere—because the Argyre was of a more recent vintage, as far as asteroid strikes go—he set the plane down without incident. Once on the ground, Jim made some kind of feeble and perhaps awkward obeisance in the direction of the planetary spirit of Mars, because this was how he was in those days. He thanked Mars for bringing him to this spot without incident, and then he got a pickax out of the back of the ultralight. Think of it, kids, Jim Rose sweating through his space suit, digging. We had just dug a grave, farther north, you see. Graves were on our minds. My mind, at any rate. We’d dug a grave because we had nothing else to do with José’s body, because there were no vultures to pick him apart, and there was no incinerator, yet, in which to put his body, and, as I’ve said, given the natural refrigeration of the planet Mars, if we had left him out in a crater, it was likely that his body would have remained in a mild state of decomposition for a very long time. So we buried him.