Diversifications

by James Lovegrove

  You can understand why I hit the roof, can’t you? I mean, that’s hardly what you might call a clear and unambiguous statement of intent. That’s not the same as “Well, Dad, I’m planning on making an application to NASA to see if I’m accepted for training for the Mars settlement programme.” (That should be “program”, shouldn’t it?) You can see my point, can’t you? Whatever your real feelings, you could hardly have come across as more vague.

  I’m not writing this to justify myself, however. I’ve looked back over the previous two paragraphs and I realise that that’s how it reads, and that’s not my intention at all. Besides, it’s a little late for self-justification. Here you are. You’re on Mars. You’ve proved your old man wrong.

  Maybe that argument we had—Well, it was a row really, wasn’t it? Maybe that row we had was the catalyst you needed. Maybe it was what finally fired you up and got you going. I have to hope that it was, because I know that things were never quite the same between us afterwards. It was as though we’d broken some delicate linking structure that neither of us realised was quite as fragile as it was. I remember you looking at me across the dining table, the very same table I’m sitting at now, and I remember the expression on your face. It was beyond anger. It was pure contempt. And I couldn’t understand what it was I’d said that had earned that contempt. All I’d been talking about was the need for responsibility, the need not to waste your life. I’d always had such hopes for you, Richard. Isobel was, and is, never going to set the world alight. She’s a lovely girl, as we all know, but it was clear from pretty early on that her best bet would be to find a decent fellow, marry him and have kids. She’s managed that—although Edward isn’t precisely the kind of husband I had in mind for her. He’s well-meaning enough, but he’s not got much up top and he’s feckless and if it wasn’t for the money he inherited…But that’s not relevant. You were the one who was going to go far, Richard. I always believed that, and then when I watched you frittering (as I thought) your life away, it just really irked me. You had all these prospects, all these opportunities …

  And now you have gone far, haven’t you? Forty-nine million miles. And you’re not coming back. You’ve abandoned this planet to start a new life—and a new world—somewhere else. You’ve become an émigré, an exile, a pioneer. You and I will never see each other again.

  And I cannot shake the feeling that I am the one who drove you away.

  Now we’re getting to the nub of it, aren’t we?

  I talked to your mother about this a couple of nights ago. I said to her that I thought I was the one responsible for your going. I’d had a whisky or three, so my guard was down. And do you know what? Your mother looked surprised at what I’d said, but also (I could see it in her eyes) she wasn’t surprised at all. As if she’d been expecting this. She’s not as bubble-headed as she sometimes makes herself out to be, your mother. Her reply was straightforward and succinct, at any rate, as if it was something she had prepared in advance long ago. “If you feel that, Charles,” she said, “why don’t you say something about it to him? We have Richard’s number in Florida. Why don’t you phone him before it’s too late?”

  I don’t know why I haven’t done so. Yes, I do. Cowardice, plain and simple. I don’t want to call you and ask you if I’m the reason you’re going to Mars and for you to say, “Yes, Dad, actually you are.” I don’t think I could bear to hear that.

  Shall I tell you something? Back when your mother and I were courting—yes, “courting”, that’s what it was, a desperately old-fashioned term I realise, but I don’t apologise for using it—back when she and I were courting, I remember one night I took her out for a drive. We left London and went all the way out to Epsom Downs. It was summer, a beautiful clear night, more stars up there in the sky than you ever see these days, in this light-polluted age. We sat in the car, that old topless MG of mine, and I remember between hand-holdings and kisses—and I know, I know, it’s embarrassing to hear about your parents when they were young doing young-people things—I pointed out some of the constellations to your mother, and what impressed her the most was when I pointed out Mars. It impressed her, or so she said, because Mars is a planet, not a star. “I didn’t know we could see planets as well,” she said. She’s since told me that she did know this, but she wanted me to feel like I was teaching her something. Such are women’s wiles. But she’s told me, too, that she was genuinely impressed by my ability to pick out and name one single star from all the hundreds up there in the heavens. It’s easy, of course. Mars is quite readily identifiable by its brightness and its pink tinge. Even so, the fact that I could pinpoint it played a significant part in my wooing of your mother. (“Wooing”—there’s another word you don’t hear used nowadays.) Certainly it was that night that I decided I was going to ask her to marry me. And since then, for that very reason, often when I’ve been out at night I’ve looked up and looked for Mars and been moved to offer it a small prayer of gratitude.

  Anyway, I think I’m close to reaching the weight-allowance for this letter, meagre as it is. So I’ll try to wrap things up as best I can.

  You’ve spent five years of your life training and preparing for this mission, Richard. Even though you’ve been on another continent, I have a good idea how hard-working and dedicated you’ve been. Reports of your progress have been filtering back to me via Isobel: the rigours, the regimen, the single-mindedness, the eschewing of all pleasures and distractions. And when you came back to England last month to say goodbye, I could see how you’d changed. There was a determination in your eyes that I’d never seen there before, a zest, a zeal. We hardly spoke to each other, did we, but all the same I knew that you had found your purpose, and I was glad.

  I still have my fears that something will go wrong. A couple of the unmanned probes crashed, didn’t they, and then there was that terrible accident on the third De Gama mission. I have this horrible feeling that your spacecraft isn’t going to make it and all fifty of you aboard are going to perish. Rationally I know it’s unlikely, but still I have that fear. That father’s fear. That’s why I’m not coming over for the launch. I’m not even going to watch it on TV. And whether you die or not, I know I’m never going to see you again, so either way I’ve lost you.

  I have to hope that you’ve made it to Mars alive and you’re reading this. This is my humble little arrival-gift to you.

  Welcome to your new home, Richard.

  Yours,

  Dad

  ares/geo uplink message

  ident: personal/richarddaniels encryption code: 17/d

  date of transmission: L+97 time of transmission: 2413 local

  Dear Dad,

  You think *your* letter had a complicated routepath? This is going to be beamed across the void to Canaveral, whereupon it will be decrypted and transferred to Isobel’s e-mail address and printed out by her and sent on via conventional post until it at last finds its way into your Luddite hands. The “potential foul-ups” are myriad, although knowing the cackhandedness of the Upper Wolcott postie, I think this has a better chance of crossing 49,000,000 miles of space safely than it does of making it, without mishap, from the depot at Middleton to your front doormat.

  Sorry it’s taken so long to respond, but all of us have, frankly, been worked off our arses here, and this is virtually the first opportunity I’ve had since landing to sit down and compose a reply. It’s getting on for midnight and I’m completely exhausted but I know I can’t postpone this any longer than I already have.

  Well, finding that envelope in my environment suit locker was a surprise, no doubt about it. If you could have seen my face! I’d gone to check the equipment, make sure nothing had been damaged in transit, and I was running diagnostics on the suits and I got to mine and there was your letter, lodged between thumb and forefinger of the left glove. Like the suit was delivering it to me. Whichever techie put it there, he or she has got a sense of humour.

  I recognise your handwriting straight away. And I love the way
you addressed it: Richard Daniels, De Gama Base, Amazonis Planitia, Mars.

  As for the contents …

  Well, Dad, I think you’ve been making a mountain out of a molehill. (And I know all about mountains now. We’ve got a good view of Olympus Mons from where we are here. It’s so vast it makes Kilimanjaro look like a pimple on a pygmy’s backside.) You and I have been at loggerheads since I was a teenager, and even before then. We were always disagreeing about something or other, don’t you recall? I didn’t want to go to boarding school. You wanted me to go. I didn’t want to try for Imperial College. You made me try. Remember when I was eight and you asked me if I wanted to learn the piano? I said no, and that made you utterly determined that I would. You booked the lessons and you made me go to them and made me practise and practise till I actually got quite proficient. There was always a friction between us, a mismatching of cogs. Yet somehow, for some reason, our relationship worked. Probably because we’re both so strong-willed. I’d refuse to do something, and that would make you adamant that I was going to do it. Maybe something similar applied the other way round too, I don’t know. Was there ever an occasion when I objected to you doing something and that made you do it? Perhaps. I can’t think of an instance right off the top of my head, but I’m sure it must have happened. Anyway, the thing is, that’s just how we are. Some fathers and sons get along and co-operate, and some don’t but get things done regardless.

  So here I am. As you know by now, lift-off and landing both went flawlessly. I can’t convey how exhilarating — and terrifying — they both were. Lift-off, I thought I was going to be shaken to pieces. Landing, I thought we were plunging to our doom, but in fact we were descending to the surface like a falling feather and I barely felt it when we actually touched down. My hat goes off to the guys and girls responsible. They were cool and calm and confident as anything throughout.

  Since then it’s been a hundred days nearly — a hundred days on Mars! — of unloading and unpacking and constructing and connecting and setting up and adjusting and putting in place and founding and establishing, and each evening I’ve staggered back to my bunk after supper and fallen asleep before I’ve barely laid my head down. We’re all getting used to one another now, and though there have been a couple of arguments, it’s never been anything serious — just tempers fraying at the end of another long hard day.

  It’s extraordinary here, Dad. The images from the De Gama missions don’t even begin to prepare you for the experience. The vistas, the texture of the light, the constant freezing cold, the low gravity, the *emptiness* of the place…At first I thought I was never going to adjust. Now I can’t imagine anything else. It gets to you, this world. It creeps up on you and infiltrates your heart. It touches you like nowhere on Earth could touch you — none of the places *I’ve* seen, at any rate.

  I get pangs of homesickness, of course. Now and then, all of a sudden it’ll hit me: I’m never going back to Earth, I’m never going to see any of my friends and family again. But the pangs aren’t nearly as bad as they were in the first few weeks after we arrived. Fewer and farther between now, and more faint.

  But look…You mustn’t go beating yourself up, Dad, about anything. Yes, I know that row we had, the one you mention, was a bad one. The worst. But it was, when all’s said and done, only one of many. We’d built up a sort of tolerance to disagreement, hadn’t we, so that when we rowed on that occasion, though it was volcanic, it was the equivalent to us of what would have been a mildly severe spat to anyone else. We didn’t quite mend fences afterwards, which maybe we should have done, and then I buggered off backpacking around the world and wound up at Canaveral and that was that. My course was set.

  You’re right to take responsibility for me being here, Dad, but responsibility in the sense of credit. Without you, I’d never have done this. I’d never have had the drive or the ability to make the necessary sacrifices.

  We just have to face the simple fact that one planet wasn’t big enough for the both of us. Two planets, on the other hand— well, maybe that’ll do.

  Like you, I’m a bit limited as to how much I can write here. They’re pretty miserly about uplink time and transmission size for personal communications. But I don’t think this is going to be the last time I’ll be getting in touch— particularly if you drag yourself into the twenty-first century and get yourself a damn computer!

  You’re naturally hard on everyone, Dad, but you’re hardest of all on yourself. I accept that. It’s not necessarily a bad quality. But I think you might just have to learn to ease up somewhat.

  I’ll tell you one thing, though. That story in your letter, the one about you pointing Mars out to Mum? Well, there’s a biochemist here, a Swiss girl. She and I have been getting along pretty well, if you know what I mean. There was never much time for fraternising and socialising while we were training, and it was sort of frowned on anyway, in case you got too friendly with someone who didn’t then make the cut to the final fifty, but now that we’re here, people have begun pairing off. It’s not only sanctioned, it’s actively encouraged.

  Anyway, she and I went out the other night for a starlit stroll. (You can’t exactly *stroll* in environment suits, you can only really do a kind of modified plodding, but a “stroll” was the import of it, if not the precise action.) And remembering what you said, I thought I’d try and impress her by picking out Earth in the sky.

  It’s easy, of course. Earth is quite readily identifiable by its brightness and its blue tinge.

  All the same, it’s a handy little trick. And I think it worked.

  Love,

  Richard

  KILLER-KILLER

  I wiped the Foreskin Collector’s blood from the blade of my Gerber locking knife, then took a few steps back from the body and cocked my head like an art critic studying a canvas.

  His ripped-open shirt revealed his bare, skinny chest. In spite of the criss-cross coagulating streaks of blood, the letters I had carved there were distinct.

  K-I-L-L-E-R.

  I depressed the catch on the knife handle, folded the blade shut and stowed the knife in my pocket. The Gerber was a beautiful piece of kit. Light as a pencil, lethal as a sword. The flat of the blade was matt and looked as if it were in fact made of plastic rather than metal, like the blade of one of those children’s dummy knives that retract when you stab. The partly-serrated cutting edge, however, was mercurially bright and mercilessly sharp. The Gerber was a countryman’s tool, designed for skinning and gutting.

  The Foreskin Collector’s split throat gaped.

  I searched his flat. It was small—sitting room, bedroom, bathroom, galley kitchen—and I did not have to look long to find his trophies.

  They were in the refrigerator, sealed in Tupperware.

  Eleven of them, like some bizarre snack-food—Hula Hoops crossed with pork scratchings.

  Why did he detach them from his victims? The police had theories. He was Jewish and resented the ceremonial surgery that had been performed on him at his bris. That was the favourite. But it was also conjectured that he was a Jew who hated Gentiles, and killed and circumcised them in a kind of homegrown religious-conversion rite. Or he was a rabbi gone mad. Or he was a woman who had been raped by a circumcised man and was exacting her revenge on male-kind. A Jewish woman, perhaps, who had been raped by an uncircumcised man.

  Theories. Permutations. Variations on a theme.

  None close to the truth.

  The Foreskin Collector was a young middle-class Caucasian male, like me.

  He felt a compulsion to kill and mutilate, like me.

  He enjoyed doing it, like me.

  That was all.

  I debated whether to set fire to the flat. While a fire would destroy any incriminating evidence I might have inadvertently left, the word I had carved into the Foreskin’s Collector’s chest would still be discernible in his charred flesh, to the forensics people if no one else, and the trophies in the Tupperware container would escape harm inside the ste
el body of the refrigerator. It would be obvious whose body this was and who had killed him.

  No. No fire. No need. I had been scrupulously careful when breaking in. I had kept my latex surgical gloves on all the time. More to the point, the Foreskin Collector shared the building with at least five other people in other flats. I did not want to risk their lives.

  He would just have to wait to be discovered. In a couple of days he would be so ripe that none of his neighbours would be able to pass his door without noticing the smell. If for some reason his death was not featured on the news by the end of the week, I would phone the police and give them an anonymous tip-off.

  The police knew me. By reputation, not by name. Most of them, I honestly thought, approved of what I was doing. They could not say as much, of course, but the efforts they had so far made to catch me were pretty lacklustre. Almost as if they wanted me to keep going. Helping them out. Doing what they wished they could do but were not permitted.

  I was a killer of killers. A killer-killer. And I was “killer” at it. So it might be said that I was a killer killer-killer.

  The house was silent. All good folk asleep in their beds. I crept downstairs and let myself out through the back door into the communal garden.

  The city droned slumberously to the indifferent stars. I tiptoed across the lawn through plum-coloured dark, and the trees soughed, and a prowling cat took fright and scrabbled over the wall into the adjacent garden.