The Four Fingers of Death (38 page)

If Jim was now avoiding the
Excelsior
, did I have anyone but myself to blame for it? It was a subject that I considered. I was an infantile romantic on these questions, and I never disliked myself more deeply than when I was an infantile romantic. What was it that made me
need
people, and then once they were contracted, lined up, what made me then want to jettison them out the air lock of my life so that I could watch them spinning into the emptiness? Once I was freed of these beloveds, there was no problem romanticizing what was lost, aggrandizing it. I was good at exulting over what once
was
, in ways that were no less genuine for their belatedness. But what about while these hostages were still present in my life? Was there a frozen part of me? A part that was ordained by fate to come to a barren and frigid planet? Jim knew only the needy, incessantly worrying, jealous part of Colonel Jed Richards, the part that had given myself to him precisely because to do so was an expression of both love and shame. In my shame, I could now know an absence of love that was unlike any before.

Overnight, in an opiated insomnia, I engaged in role-playing animations with folks back on Earth, people with missing limbs and general paralysis, the only persons who could tolerate a thirty-odd-minute delay from an exiled respondent. There was a special game for these persons, as there was also a special web portal for them, as there was by now a special web portal for just about everyone, including consensual cannibals and people who believed that the members of the Mars mission were being filmed on a soundstage (in the watery city of Tampa, Florida). On this site where I slew time, disabled people, people with locked-in syndrome, were free to design bodies for themselves and to interact with one another. They flew and battered and fucked and killed, and thus overcame their disabilities, and I encouraged them.
Are you as hot as you look here? Are you interested in trying to cum with me?
said the double amputee from Lawrence, KS. I didn’t tell her that I was slow replying because I was on another planet. I didn’t tell her I was likely to perish here, and that I would undoubtedly fail to complete the conversation for that reason, whether from starvation, oxygen deprivation, or contamination by a hitherto unknown organism.
I am a switch, baby, I can be a top or bottom, what I want is to be used so that I can feel something beyond what I have before me here
. I was overdue to give myself another injection too. I could feel it, the sharp edge of disappointment beginning to force its way up through the lukewarm bath of opiated disinterest. The ritual of doping myself, the planning, the application of a tourniquet, the depressing of the plunger, these had laid bare my resistance to injection. But I was also thinking about trying to withdraw soon—which addict does not think of such things—before I had to go over to the
Geronimo
and steal some of their cache. The next day, when I would go to see Abu’s sculptures, would be an opportune moment to resupply.
Why so dissatisfied with life?
said the flying gryphon with the three shapely breasts, drifting over some self-designed Japanese rock garden where you could watch videos of bondage-loving sylphs. Thus had the digital realities become refractions of the unchecked marketeering of the first world, now drifting through empty space to the Red Planet.
Because I live in a place where nothing green grows except underripe tomatoes and where there is no water, except water that has long since been made brackish from reuse, and there is no one here but white men bent on exterminating one another. I don’t know if I’ll ever find a way to get out with my skin
. The gryphon performed a sort of a bowing and scraping gesture in my direction, one of the ninety-three physical responses permitted by the software module, and she said,
Las Vegas? Mexico City?
I pulled the syringe out of my leg, where there were some uncorrupted spots to hit, and my head swooned.
Does that make me any less worthy of human kindness?
The gryphon, after the delay, seemed to me to be emerging from the screen, moving into the cabin with me, holographically, as if she knew this was where I was.
No human being is any less worthy. Have you ever loved a gryphon?
I said,
I have loved some very unusual people
. She said,
Such as?
I said,
I have loved an astronaut, in zero g’s. I have loved men and women behind enemy lines in Central Asia and the Caucasus
. She said,
Hot. Do you want to tell me about it while I work on you
. The animation of the program permitted certain kinds of erotic contact, as long as the participants registered as consenting adults. A miming of safe sex was also required. Once the female role-player either elected to insert an animated diaphragm or IUD, had agreed to pop a little pill marked
eat me
, or had refused birth control outright, only then could the man have his choice of ribbed, texture-dotted prophylactics, or the ever popular digitally animated vasectomy, where a little pair of scissors would fall out of the blue sky and snip away. I was inclined to want to wear the condom, as it reminded me of my space suit. And so I picked a condom from the list of clothes I was permitted to wear by the game. The gryphon began lactating, jerkily, because of the time delay. Every few minutes, she would spontaneously fountain for a second or two.

Did I not know this fountaining was permitted by the program? Somehow I had never considered the ephemeral perfection of lactating before. Each of the gryphon’s three nipples spumed steadily, and I stood, in my modified lumberjack outfit, as the gryphon milked herself into my mouth. I was so high that I stopped to ponder, in the interval while I waited for the animation to reset again from 40 million miles away (we had moved out of alignment with you all), whether the gryphon milk could actually help me with my malnourishment problem. The milk was a torrent now, across my face, and I drank deeply of it, and I performed the keystrokes that would make my
space arm
stand up like a beacon of interplanetary comity, and then the gryphon, making some kind of horrendous mewling sound made more forbidding because of signal feedback, parted the lips of her labia and swallowed first my head and then the entirety of me. I disappeared inside.

Somewhere in the midst of this rebirthing ritual, I must have nodded off. The gryphon no doubt had her way with me, enfolding me and emulsifying me in her amorous sluices and jellies, and whether I had obliged to return the favor with my oversized animated
space arm
was unknown to me. I woke and it was morning, and there was an incoming message on the walkie-talkie from Steve Watanabe. I could hear the static of the radio signal. These days the walkie-talkie buzzed at me with greater and greater infrequency, as the Martians disappeared into their solitary desperations.

I shook off the morphine static from the night before and picked up the handset. Steve greeted me with his usual reserve.

“You might want to come over.”

“What’s up?”

“It’s about Abu. He wasn’t here when I woke. It was his shift, but he wasn’t here. I figured I’d go out back for a look.”

That, he told me, was when he saw Abu outside. Half stripped of his Mars outer gear, rated for the two hundred degrees below. He walked me through the details again. The sculptures, the cold, the exposure. I told him I’d be over as soon as I could.

“Is Jim anywhere around?”

“Not back yet.”

“I’m just thinking we might want to consider the possibility, you know, of foul play.”

At this point, I cut the conversation short. I told Steve I was skeptical, and I rang off. After which I tried to contact Jim Rose, who, when gallivanting around the planet on his daily or nearly daily reconnaissance missions, was often lazy about telecommunications equipment. And then with a leftover sense of responsibility, I checked the radar map on the command console to see what Brandon was up to. He had moved farther into the canyon, as if what he was looking for was buried away in the layers of dust and sediment. As if he were burrowing into the origins of the canyon, in the east. I went and suited up.

March 27, 2026

When I arrived at the
Geronimo
and found Steve Watanabe out front in a space suit that was nothing like the pocked rags the rest of us were wearing, a space suit mostly unused, he looked not quite as depressed as his reputation.
Agitated
would have better described it.
Confused affect, marked by the presentation of deceit
, as they are now saying in the NASA internal literature, or exhibiting symptoms of
interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome
. I would have also said “anxious” or “conspiratorial.” Steve was sweating, I believe. His visor was fogged up.

“He’s strapped into his bed downstairs,” he said.

Meaning Abu Jmil, first officer, sculptor, engineer of nuclear power. What was left of him. We went around to the cargo entrance and closed the squeaky hatch door behind us. There was a pall to the
Geronimo
. I could never understand how people could feel productive in low light. Abu, as advertised, was stretched out on one of the pallets in the cargo hold. Covered with a blanket.

“How did you get him home?”

“He was still able to walk at that point,” Steve said. “He was partially conscious. His legs did a little bit of work. Then he blacked out completely—once we got back here.”

It hadn’t occurred to me to arm myself that morning. In truth, it never occurred to me to arm myself, despite my military training. I left that to tougher people, like Abu. Pulling off my gloves and my helmet, and setting them down on the floor, I got out the radiophone I kept on my person and radioed over to the
Pequod
. Bad reception. All the while Steve gaped at me, as though he just didn’t know what to do with himself.

“Arnie? Laurie? It’s Jed calling.”

Arnold Gilmore’s sleepy voice on the squawk box, compressed, tinny.

“Kind of early, isn’t it?”

“Got a situation,” I said.

“What kind of a situation?”

“Steve tell you about Abu?”

He sounded confused. “What about him?”

“Says he found him out back of the power station, with his sculptures, and that Abu spent the night out there. In the permafrost. And, well, he says that Abu took off most of his outerwear. Parts of his skin were even exposed.”

“Repeat, please?” Laurie, who must have been there in the room with him, could be heard in the background. To her, Arnie mumbled, “Hang on, there’s something wrong with Abu.”

I took up the story: “Steve says that Abu was out all night working on his sculpture and that he was exposed to the low temps overnight, and Steve further observes that Abu must have elected to remove his gear.”

“Doubtful,” said Arnie, improvising. “Unless he was set on a painful death.”

“Could you make a house call?”

“As soon as I can get there.”

I holstered the communications device. Once the call to Arnie was effected, I found myself standing in a half-lit cargo bay with a very jittery young man who clearly had something on his mind. Steve shifted himself from leg to leg so violently that even in his lightweight extraterrestrial Mars surface exploration jumpsuit he was some kind of kundalini adept. And perhaps I haven’t adequately described Steve Watanabe, the George Harrison of the Mars mission, and so let me present to you, those of you who haven’t seen the portrait photo that NASA took of him in his space suit (one gloved palm on the top of his helmet as it sat imposingly on a table), nor read the press releases, nor seen the feed: the actual Steve, which is to say the Martian Steve, was generally mute, some people would say downright chilly. Not given to a smile, nor to pleasantries that lasted longer than the minimum. During the training portion of our mission, we sometimes referred to Steve as the
Department of Quantitative Analysis
, because of his capacity to miss the human dimension, and also because he always thought through a problem from a number of practical angles before proceeding, immobilizing himself in the process.