The Four Fingers of Death (36 page)

In the process of burying José we did soil tests, as we always did. And this process had not yielded any irrefutable data yet, though Steve had preserved an ambiguous sample of the dirt several feet down and taken it back toward the power plant for more testing. Whatever Steve may or may not have found was completely different from what was at Argyre. At Argyre, kids, there was a bounty in the regolith. The bounty was not even far below the surface. The bounty was there waiting to be harvested, as though the destitute face that Mars presented to the heavens, to the orbiting crafts, to the unmanned missions that had landed here in the past fifteen or twenty years, was completely fraudulent, deliberately so. Jim wasn’t even six feet down when, making use of an electrical coil he’d patched together back at the
Excelsior
, he melted himself a cup full
of water
.

Water! That tasteless (or mostly tasteless), odorless (or mostly odorless) fortification that makes up the vast majority of our physique. Call it a long cool drink, call it
rehydrating
, call it an adulteration, it was the thing that made Earth, the watery planet, what it was, a teeming, complicated celebration of organics. It was the first requirement for life! And here it was! Frozen into the subsoil on Mars in a way in which just about anyone could get to it, if only he were willing to dig. Some of the unmanned Mars missions had come tantalizingly close, but they’d found mere traces of H
₂
O in places where it was inefficient (by reason of landscape) to harvest it, or where it was evaporated quickly. We had set our ships down in just such a landscape. A deserted part of a desert planet.

Which did make you wonder why. Why we were originally slated for the South Pole, not that much farther south than the Argyre Basin, where there was definitely some kind of ice, mostly liquid CO
₂
, which can be made, at least, to yield its oxygen without too much chemical manipulating. Why we were not there now, when to be there would have amounted to a self-sustaining Martian community, if a very cold one, unless NASA really
did
have some kind of objective that they were not telling us about. An objective that involved, however disagreeably, a piecemeal elimination of Mars mission astronauts, so as to preserve resources—water and power—for the trip home.

This conspiracy mongering came easily to me on the day that I was alone in the
Excelsior
. Jim, as we learned later, was at the same time blowtorching and harvesting a container of water for himself from the humus of the Martian subsurface, and when he had produced a sufficient amount, he actually—though it was against regulations to do so—
drank
some of this water.

Let us pause here. Because it was a horrible idea. Anyone on the mission would have told him as much, as indeed would have any scientist from home. We
assumed
that the surface of Mars was largely sterile, because of samples we’d taken, now and in the past, but where Jim had dug was not the surface, and what happened underneath the surface we just didn’t know! And yet Jim, in the wilderness, wanted to trust Mars, wanted to prove himself to it, that superficially empty place. He wanted Mars to know we were somehow worthy of her. He had been planning as much, I learned later, all along. He needed to be alone with Mars. And he needed to do this, to drink what the planet offered him, because at that moment he had a vision for the future of the planet. He drank, sacramentally, to punctuate this moment. He didn’t know, initially, if he had imbibed trace radioactive elements. He didn’t know if he had exceeded his recommended daily allowance for iron or lead. I, for one, almost always carried a Geiger counter with me, to keep a tally of exposure, but not Jim. Jim, according to the story as it has been handed down, drank deeply of the water, dried his mouth with the back of his hand before closing his visor again, and, according to this tale as we know it, he then said, aloud, to himself, “This is where I will live and die, in order to make this a better place than the planet from which I come.”

What a solitary and terrifying thought. This man had family at home. He had friends who loved him and who, while admiring of his courage, were expecting him back at some point. How shall we interpret this moment? you ask. He didn’t see any god. He wasn’t hallucinating. He was being pragmatic. As pragmatic as one can be when one has
interplanetary disinhibitory disorder
. What Jim felt, in the absence of a beneficent and loving entity who would, back on Earth, help him to win big at the lottery or find a parking space, was a tremendous reassurance in the pristine silence of the Argyre Basin. It would be
all right
. He filled a metal container with water, put it in the small storage hatch in the ultralight, and when he was through with his sacrament, he lifted off again. Did Brandon take the bait? Was he somehow monitoring our activities too, and making note of our progress in the south?

Meanwhile, I should add, my wife was contacting me from Earth:

[email protected]
:
Jed, are you there? We’re getting the most horrible news down here about the mission. None of it in the press yet, but still. People are saying things. They’re saying that there is trouble on Mars, that someone may even have been murdered. Is that true?

[email protected]
:
Pogey, I’m not at liberty to discuss Martian internal affairs. You know that.

[email protected]
:
Jed, it’s me. You don’t have to give me the party line. I get enough of that down here. Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on? Is everyone okay? Are you okay?

[email protected]
:
It’s impossible to explain what’s going on here, that’s all I can say.
It’s not like Earth
. It’s a different place. The language is changing already. The language already applies to Martian things in different ways. I don’t know if I can tell you in a way that will make sense. We belong to a different planet, whose culture is rapidly evolving in ways that will be hard to understand back on the home planet. Our ethics and legal system are already beginning to diverge.

[email protected]
:
I really hate it when you say I can’t understand things. It’s so condescending. But it’s not really for myself that I’m asking anyway. I’m worried about Ginger. She hears things around. At school, on the base (when she’s there), she doesn’t know what to think. She’s mostly too independent to ask you these kinds of things herself, or that’s what I think. But she wants to know. I think you ought to talk to her. More than you’re doing now.

[email protected]
:
Well, I’m
fine
. That’s all she needs to know. I can’t run the risk that our communications are being monitored by Mission Control. I’m sure they are, as a matter of fact. We intend to solve the issues, the problems, internally, the ones you’re alluding to. There’s a lot going on, and the situation is fluid, changing by the day. If you can give me a sign that you are you, and that you are not being used by other people at this moment, I can reassure you a little bit. So maybe you can remind me about the illustration on your lower back?

[email protected]
:
The tattoo?

[email protected]
:
Don’t waste time with two-word responses.

[email protected]
:
St. Theresa in ecstasy. Like the sculpture.

[email protected]
:
Why did you leave your husband?

[email protected]
:
What do you mean? I left my husband because he left me. Long ago. In all the symbolic ways. If you really want to know, if this is really how you want to deal with this question now, I’ll say that my husband is so broken, so lost, that he’s incapable of opening up to anyone on Earth, least of all me. So I hope he is better at opening up to people on Mars. His impenetrability makes him very effective at certain kinds of military operations, where human emotions just clog up the system. Where emotions just get in the way of things. There was a time when I was able to see through all this to the person within him. Then he felt exposed, he didn’t want me, he walled himself off, he was too walled off to be able to
want
me.

[email protected]
:
Okay, I believe that you are you. I thank you for your credible information. The following is what I have to say to you, for Ginger, and for the Mars mission people, who will likely force you to give them a transcript of this exchange. There are forces in the universe that make havoc of the human personality as we understand it. The human personality is a tendency to respond to certain planetary stimuli in certain predictable ways. In the absence of predictable planetary stimuli, the personality no longer acts or organizes itself according to any therapeutically based model. Talk show lingo just does not apply here. We found these things on the crossing. The movement out of ourselves into some new dynamic of identity was slow but undeniable. You could see it in the others if not in yourself. The watery planet is an orderly place, despite its apparent systemic chaos. Elsewhere, like here in the arctic desert of Mars, feelings run out onto the empty canvas. They evaporate like water vapor, or carbon dioxide, which, here, goes straight from a solid to a gas. Nothing is explicable. Murderous rage is as common as dark matter. Nothing in the color wheel of emotions is not experienced regularly here. Often at the same time. What does this mean about those left behind? Our loved ones? What it means is that never a day goes by when we are not convulsed in confusion and loss, with the sense that we have been so profoundly changed that the selves that we
were
will not make it back to the watery planet intact. Mars is a place of death. It is fascinatingly dead. Its death is so complex as to be more lively than life. I miss Ginger more than I can say, Pogey, and I want to make up to you what I have failed to do as a person. I was a better person when you first met me. But this ends my communication for now, because I have official responsibilities to see to.

March 26, 2026

If I didn’t say so before, there is the constant danger of hypothermia on the planet Mars. While I occasionally speak of people opening and closing their visors and breathing the atmosphere, I think I should reiterate that this happens almost never. Breathing here is like asphyxiating in your friend’s garage in Greenland. This makes it even more inexplicable, based on our experience, that Abu would attempt to take off his regulation threads, while out working on his sculptures behind the power plant, and thus fall prey to a really aggravated case of hypothermia. Unless he was afflicted with the character illness we have so far found among ourselves. Whose name, again, is
interplanetary disinhibitory disorder
.

This was last week, and since then Abu has been in and out of consciousness. Arnie has been looking after him in the greenhouse, and I should report, while I’m speaking of the greenhouse, that Abu’s situation came to light a mere twenty-four hours after we learned of our first fully vine-ripened interplanetary tomato. Laurie thought it would be incredibly small because there are not the right nutrients for a tomato in the soil we brought with us, and she was right. Nor were the appropriate nutrients to be found here in the Martian soil. However, what a Martian tomato lacks in size it more than makes up in taste. I am willing to believe that it was the total absence of tomato (or most anything else among fruits and vegetables, excepting soy) and a shortage of vitamin pills that resulted in my losing a front tooth last week. But let us brush, so to speak, across my dental woes. Let us move directly to the celebration of this Martian tomato.

The spice trade, kids, began because people were stultified by their traditional cuisine. If we could have managed a spice trade on Mars, we would have embarked on it immediately. Cumin! Mustard! Coriander! Allspice! The tomato came into our lives the way these spices, and the Dutch East India Company, revolutionized medieval Europe, by despoiling Africa and Asia of their resources. The historical spices distracted fetid, malodorous religious zealots from popping the smallpox on their gin-blossomed noses long enough to give way to the Renaissance! Let’s hope the tomato does the same on Mars!