The Four Fingers of Death (40 page)

“No,” Steve said, “that’s not what I’m saying. I can’t believe you’d… What I’m saying is…” But the enormity of his malfeasance was now out in the open. It was as if some drapery that had once concealed the
Geronimo
had been lifted from it, and we were seeing the contents of the capsule in their true light for the first time.
“
…
it had to do with his sculptures.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“… because of the sculptures! Because of the sculptures! What do you want me to say? Jed, I went out and I saw the sculptures, and I saw how Abu was
making something
of his time here, and I’d made
nothing
of my time here. Do you know what brought me out here? Do you know what it was? It was that stuff I read as a kid. All the early rocketeers, those guys out in the backyards and in the flatlands of the desert, lighting off their homemade rockets and watching them soar into the firmament. I could never do that, because I was never smart that way. That dream of theirs, Goddard and those guys, was what kept me awake at night. That, and the fact that rocketry was a bunch of failures interrupted by the occasional improbable success. That was something I thought—and maybe I was just ridiculously vain here or something—but I thought it was something I could
help
with. All the failures on the way to Mars, the fact that Mars itself is a failure of planning built upon a failure of vision, in which there is wreckage and phenomenal waste at every turn, Jed, I really thought that I could be one of the people who made a difference! And what did I give up to make a difference? Look, reflect back on all the early thinkers about the planets; you have what’s his name, the guy who was covered with boils and scars and abandoned by his family, Kepler, right? His wife dies and leaves him with the kids, and he is chased from town to town until he dies of hunger somewhere trying to find food for his kids, or there’s Tycho Brahe, missing part of his nose. The guy actually wore a metal nose, and that was in, like, 1560 or something. Galileo died under house arrest after the Vatican hounded him for years. Do I have to go on? Do I have to talk about all the Mars missions? The Soviets lost
five
Mars orbiters between 1960 and 1962! Five of them. They didn’t get out of Earth’s atmosphere or their communications failed or they had badly designed rockets! The same for the majority of the American missions in the next ten years. Failed to achieve orbit or crashed on Mars. In 1971, the Soviets had an orbiting satellite broadcast back for eighteen seconds! Then more failures! In 1973, the Mars 7 from the Soviet Union missed the planet! Where is it now? Fifty years later? Near Alpha Centauri, maybe? Then there were the two Phobos missions, both failures, the first Mars observer, which failed in Mars orbit. The Nozomi from Japan never lifted off properly. You want more? The Polar Lander was supposed to harvest water ice, but crashed, and I saw pieces of it on the radar recently; the Deep Space probe went too deep into space; in 2010, Headstrong, the chimpanzee, went insane from the stress of the three-month interplanetary journey, despite an endless supply of bananas, and electrocuted himself. The Greenlander terraforming lab struck Deimos and shattered, right? The Arcadia 1 explorer unit somehow dismantled itself upon achieving a smooth landing. Jed, you get the idea.

“Space travel is littered with the flameouts, with the outcasts, and I decided I was one of them. I decided I wanted to contribute to space travel the way these people did, and I left behind my wife and son to do it. I sat them down and I said I had to do this, I had to come to Mars, because what we needed to accomplish on Mars was more important than any one person. And I did believe I was going to come back. But then somewhere along the way, after Debbie died, I started to be privy to all the communications from the home planet, because I assumed some of Debbie’s job description, and I started to realize that it was less likely that I
was
going to make it home. I started to realize that what I accomplished here meant nothing,
nothing
, Jed, and I’d been lied to, and that NASA would just as soon leave our bodies out on the desert floor as they would throw a party to celebrate a successful launch back in the Everglades. We were coming to Mars for strategic reasons, not for the science. And I’d made the decision to leave my family, to leave behind my son, terribly ill, and I had traveled all the way out here to live like an indigent, and I had this big horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, every day, seemed like, when I’d get up and look out the window at the red desert. I felt like something horrible was going to happen, and all I could bring myself to do was to drink the ethyl alcohol in the maintenance closet, the alcohol that I was supposed to be using to clean component parts of the reactor. I started drinking it a little bit at a time, and I started swiping all kinds of meds from the first aid closet. That’s how it was over here on the
Geronimo
, Jed; worse than in some tent community back on Earth.

“And the worst part was that none of it affected Abu at all. Abu had this ability to see the good in almost everything, and I was watching Abu melt down pieces of metal from the reactor and take this scrap out back, and some of the goddamned sculptures are glowing now; you knew that, right? You know that the sculptures shimmer a little bit? Like he took bits of spent fuel from the fuel assembly, and he put this graphite in the sculptures. Sure, it means that the sculptures are a little bit dangerous to us, for ten thousand years or so, but he just didn’t care about any of that, because he already knew how much cosmic radiation he had picked up, not to mention the radon all over the place in every crater around us. Abu used everything that was waste, detritus; he picked it up and he started making these shapes and forms, and it was like Abu couldn’t put his hand down anywhere without leaving a mark that says:
Here are traces of our dignity!
Jed, I just couldn’t take it anymore. How can you withstand someone who sees the good in everything? Who never admits to a moment of envy or irritation? And when he came at me asking if he could start attaching the sculptures to the power station, hook the sculptures up to the reactor and the living quarters, which was still only half built out, so that our outsider art-tent community was sprawling into the desert, spreading joy, good cheer, human aspiration everywhere, that’s when I couldn’t take it anymore.… I just snapped.”

Steve folded over, head in hands, as his monologue reached its heartbreaking conclusion. He fell against the wall of the cargo hold, turning his face from men, namely from me and Arnie, who had appeared on the scene just then. In the pall of the
Geronimo
, I couldn’t bring myself to recount the whole story to Arnie. Observing a modest silence, I showed him where Abu’s slumbering form was stretched out on the pallet. While the official examination began, I found the parts of my jumpsuit that I’d stripped away at the door, and I headed out back. For a little walk through the sculpture garden. Given what Steve had said, I figured there wasn’t much chance of my harvesting any pain medication from the first aid kit of the
Geronimo
. Not yet. Although I was doing the kind of calculations that you do with such things:
Well, if he took this much, for this many days, and with a three-year supply, according to the manual, then how much could remain…

I happened on the sculptures the way you crest a sand dune and find yourself by the sea, which is to say with anticipation and wonder. The sculptures dotted a half acre of land behind the reactor, and it wasn’t that they resembled the “primitive” art that you found on Earth, so much as they seemed to contain tribal representations of Martians, all fashioned, as Steve said, from metal detritus and silicone found around the site. Abu had used some of the parachute from the landing of the
Geronimo
, which looked almost like a tattered shroud. The Martians were cloaked in that cloth, and the steady Martian winds blew these creations, luffing and sighing, as if they were sailing vessels carrying Martian brigands. At the far end, where Abu had begun staining the gunmetal gray of the available metals with the reddish gray of Martian soil, so that his recent works looked like the volcanic rock outcroppings around us, he had also inlaid a brace of video monitors from back in the power station, and on these he was running loops of NASA footage of the planet Mars, solar powered. There wasn’t an
Earth
to be found anywhere in this dolmen circle of his works, just the totemic forms, and the representations of Mars, and the
sun;
kids, remember that Mars too always went around the sun, and the moons went around Mars, and in that reliable orbiting, Abu’s sculptural installation was much in the style of early-twenty-first-century installation art. But it was also very much connected back to the ancient stonework of the Druidic peoples of Europe. Or at least that would be my art critical take on the whole thing, that it was about what was new
and
what was old, and so it was something that was meant to be left behind. I spent a while out back considering the sculptures, while the sun was at its highest, and I could see how the shadows were part of the work. The shadows completed the pieces, making transepts and buttresses, implying outstretched limbs. When I had established that one viewing was not enough, I trudged around the power station and back into the
Geronimo
, vowing to return.

Arnie was busy washing his hands with some water that was probably not at all what we might have referred to, on the home planet, as
potable
.

“Watanabe?” I asked.

Arnie came up short. Looked at me quizzically.

“I thought he was with you.”

“I thought he was with
you
.”

“Did you have a look in the power station? Were you in there?”

I suspected Steve Watanabe was
not
in the power station. I suspected the forklift that they used for transporting the fuel assemblies and so forth would be
gone
. I suspected that his decision had been arrived at quickly. By necessity.

“What do you make of Abu?” I asked Arnie.

“Blunt force trauma. He’ll either come out of it or he won’t. If he’s in a coma, you know what to do. He’s bleeding in the back of the head. Probably has cranial pressure, all of that.”

Arnie held the rag with which he was drying his hands for a moment and looked at the scrap of warps and wooves, as if it had just been lifted from the face of our lost comrade.

“We’re in trouble here,” he said.

I said, “Hey, while we’re on the subject, I’m having a really hard time sleeping. You know, aches in the spots where the fingers were reattached and phantom limb syndrome from the missing finger; do you think you could—”

For the record, I did have some second thoughts, buried inside, second thoughts about the shape that life on Mars had taken, with its darkness and its callousness. There was a piquancy to Abu’s sculptures, as I had seen them, and it was matched by an absolute lack of compassion everywhere else on the planet. And I was worst of all. I wanted to do better, but I didn’t seem able to do better. Arnie didn’t give my request a second thought. He had morphine syringes on his person. Whether he knew the purpose of my request or not, he didn’t say. At that point I wouldn’t have cared either way.

March 28, 2026

The most prized of Martian sights, if we were to speak of this neglected planet in the terms reserved for tourist attractions, are the traces of unmanned missions past.

The early Mars exploratory missions were like the old masters to us now. Their gear had long since been reduced to buckets of eroded junk. And yet every time we went out into the field, on whatever experiment or mapping initiative, we looked for their tracks. As if seeing some glorified wheelbarrow that the USA or the European Union had sent up would make us less homesick.

It was Laurie Corelli who used to joke about the infamous Mars explorer called
Saratoga
, which like so many unmanned missions to Mars had gone dark shortly after landing. From the
Saratoga
, NASA got a few shots of the polar landscape, where the
Saratoga
was intended to set up shop, and these shots were of gaseous vapors burning off around the rover, as if it were standing in the midst of some heavenly Finnish spa. Immediately thereafter, the
Saratoga
fell into silence. Another $15 or $20 billion of taxpayer money flushed into the sewage field of aeronautic history. The interesting twist in the tale of the
Saratoga
, however, was that there had been two occasions, two days later, when the rover actually checked back in. These transmissions broke through the radio silence and the background radiation—for fifteen or twenty seconds. In each circumstance, the rover was far from where it had been projected to be, as if it had somehow developed a will of its own on Mars and was well on its way to a location of its choosing. After these brief, appealing moments of contact, the
Saratoga
slipped out of range for good. In subsequent years, NASA would occasionally (and only internally) claim to have seen something that might or might not have been a transmission from the
Saratoga
, or perhaps even a still photo of its dusty chassis. But there was a fair amount of space junk on the planet’s surface now, so who knew really?