How to Mars

by David Ebenbach

  And so the rest of the hope is still on you being gone somehow. We think that there are a lot of ways you could be gone. So that’s a thing that we think about.

  And, even better, about how maybe we can make that happen.

  We think you would use the word hope.

  What You Can’t Do (Part One)

  (Section 4 of the unofficial Destination Mars! handbook, as written by the founder of Destination Mars!)

  We are not big on rules here at Destination Mars! We have procedures that we follow on Earth, and obviously we’ve thought about what you’re heading for, and have advice for you on a range of issues and circumstances that you’re likely to encounter—but we are also aware that we don’t really know what you’re going to encounter at all, and that of course we can’t prepare you for things that are ultimately unknown. (Though see Section 27 for some thoughts on how you might want to deal with the many unknowns that are going to be coming at you.) On top of that, we also don’t want to get in your way, and would be limited in our ability to do so even if we wanted to; we’re sending you to Mars, but we won’t be there with you. And so, in the realest possible sense, Mars is going to be yours. Yours to put your hard work and sweat into, to inhabit and to till, hopefully, eventually, and to shape. To fill with whatever culture and customs and social structures you like. (Though see Section 19.) That’s as it should be. All this to say that we don’t want to hamper your creativity with a variety of rules around how to behave on a new planet. But we do have one rule, in part because you’ve got to have something to start with, and in larger part because this rule is a very important one. So let’s be clear:

  You are not allowed to have sex on Mars.

  You will hear this from us quite a few times and in a variety of formats, but it bears repeating because we’re not sure how easy it will be for you to follow:

  YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE SEX ON MARS.

  Let us explain, in the following three subsections:

  Subsection 4:1: Social Impacts

  There will only be a handful of you on Mars.

  If you want an analogy, think of your situation as similar to a big off-campus house that you might rent with a bunch of friends in your senior year of college. You start off with lots of enthusiasm, naturally—you’re going to have chore wheels! everybody will cook together! house parties! thoughtful house meetings every week where you discuss every conceivable issue in an enlightened and sensitive way! it’ll be the way society should be!

  And maybe for a while it is like that. Everybody’s happily exhausted after moving all the boxes in. The chore wheel that one of you made is colorful and spins perfectly. While the good weather lasts you have beers on the porch in the evenings. Then the first party is amazing—full of the joy of living, and of living together. Everybody’s happy to be eating the same thing. Even when the toilet breaks you all rally around and get it fixed somehow, and you don’t even get too aggressive about figuring out who flushed what crazy object to break the toilet in the first place, because you’re all in it together.

  But then something ruins everything. And you know what that thing is. We all know what that thing is: one of you has sex with another one of you. Which is, frankly, the end of every utopia. (We consider the apple in the Biblical story to be a kind of metaphor.) Here’s what happens:

  You start spending more time with each other and less with everyone else, which creates a kind of gravitational shift in the house, which goes from being one big us to something more fractured.

  The two of you start echoing each other’s points at the weekly house meetings, becoming a voting bloc of sorts, a fact that is not lost on your increasingly resentful housemates.

  This escalates. When one of you uses up all the hot water the other pretends not to know who did it. When one of you breaks the chair in the living room the other one gets rid of the evidence. When one of you leaves a thousand dirty dishes in the sink the other one makes excuses, or even lies about who left them there.This can create issues within the couple that’s having sex, of course, which is a danger in its own right. More on this below.

  Meanwhile, inspired by your thoughtless example, other people in the house begin thinking about having sex.They think, for example, about having sex with other people in the house.Maybe they think about having sex with one of the two people who are now having sex with each other, which naturally causes a lot of tension.

  Maybe they think about having sex with one of the people in the house who is not in the couple.If the other person is amenable, the house continues to further balkanize.

  If the other person is not amenable, discomfort spreads and people start to dislike each other actively.

  Or people might start leaving the house for sex, which fractures things even more.

  And then there’s always the possibility that the couple having sex stops having sex. People are very unpredictable, after all; you can’t really count on them. So whether the two are fighting about all the tension in the house or something else, the relationship falls apart. Probably unpleasantly. And now there are two sides in something very explosive, and everyone has to take sides, and the whole thing gets very ugly. And what was once a potential utopia where each person kept their feelings and impulses safely to themselves is now a bunch of disgruntled people who talk behind each other’s backs and yell at each other and maybe even throw things. Everybody finally hates everyone else and you’re all just wishing for graduation to hurry up and get there so that you never have to see each other again.

  And the thing is that on Mars it’s going to be worse than that, because:You are not friends to begin with.

  There is no graduation, and nowhere to go outside of the metaphorical house. You will be stuck with each other, forever, in the only place on the entire planet where there is food and breathable air. Outside of the metaphorical house is only death.

  Sex, in other words, is a selfish pursuit that can probably only happen at the expense of the community. The community that is your only chance of survival.

  Game Night with the O’Marses

  Things have been so boring on Mars for so long that I more or less forgot that I’m a psychologist. But now Jenny’s pregnancy is making everyone weird, so all of a sudden—I realize it one morning when I wake up and see Trixie hovering over sleeping Jenny, quietly applying a stethoscope to Jenny’s pooched-out torso—I’m a psychologist again.

  When we first got here, I had this little office—well, it was more like a booth, just big enough for two chairs—off the common room, and I would sit down with everybody regularly and ask how they were doing. That was why I was there: to keep an eye on how everybody was doing. And primarily how everybody was doing was excited. I mean, we were on Mars. We had traveled through space for six months and landed in our rocket, and that was pretty exciting, obviously—we didn’t crash or die, for starters—and then we were the first six people to ever set foot on Mars. Which, all by itself, wow. That thought stays with you for a while. And there was the buzz of the early weeks, setting things up and getting our feet under us. Absorbing the red landscape. We were on Mars! Lots of excitement to be experienced. Everything was new; everything was unknown. So Trixie was bopping all over the place singing her favorite pop songs and digging up subsurface water samples, and Roger was gathering up rocks upon rocks and going on about tholeiitic basalt, and Nicole was walking around with her hands on her hips with an open-mouthed expression that was basically Well, would you look at this, and even sometimes sort of giggling when she couldn’t help it—she would clap her hand over her mouth each time and then right away get super-serious again—and Jenny had these big big eyes (beautiful, light brown) and she would go out to look at the sky every night and go totally silent for an hour at a time, and Stefan—well, Stefan was decompensating, apparently, which basically means losing it, and that turned into some alarming but luckily mino
r early violence, but I’m telling you there’s more to Stefan than that.

  As for me, I knew my mission was to watch over everyone else, and so I did. I was there because nobody knew what to expect from throwing a few not-totally-random-but-still-kind-of-random people together into a completely crazy situation for the rest of their lives. And as it turned out, at first, the main thing—aside from the early violence—was that good old-fashioned excitement. Fast heartbeat, fast breath, busy brain, wide eyes. Each person would sit down in my booth and would tell me, in one way or another, I AM SO EXCITED.

  Which I was, too. How could anybody not be?

  We had all signed up for this, of course. We had our reasons. And I guess the reasons were good enough for someone. Supposedly the way this not-totally-random group happened was that we were chosen from among all the other applicants by TV viewers—the reality show started back on Earth—but I’ve never believed that. I mean, I would be surprised if Destination Mars! paid attention to any of that voting. I think they just thought we’d make for good drama.

  But things are only new until they’re old, and they’re only unknown until you know them. And drama can run out.

  In the beginning of our time here, when the Destination Mars! cameras were still rolling for the reality show and when everybody here was sampling and drilling and scanning and analyzing and mapping and communicating with fellow scientists back on Earth and doing all the kinds of things people of a scientific mindset like to do, at first we produced and shared one finding after the next—Look at this rock! Look at that rock! And I had a lot to say into the cameras about all the dynamic and in fact layered personalities and so on. But after a while the findings started to find the same things over and over. There were no signs of life anywhere. The much-reduced gravity and increased radiation weren’t doing anything especially surprising to our physiology. The stars were pretty similar to stars as seen from Earth, and anyway dust made it hard to see them a lot of the time. Things slowed down, and slowed down some more, and then they slowed down even more. Two-plus years in, most folks have stopped sciencing at the same rate, have stopped reading the professional journals and sending findings back home. Two-plus years in, it’s more like, Would you look at all these damn rocks?

  So: the Destination Mars! cameras stopped rolling, the reality show canceled for lack of interest, and Trixie got more interested in Sudoku than water samples (or, in my opinion, got to the point where she could handle a Sudoku puzzle a lot better than another sterile sample) and Stefan was always off muttering to his machines and Nicole mainly focused on the chore wheel and Jenny and I started falling for each other, which turns out to be a lot more interesting, at least to us, than being on a planet millions of miles from Earth, and Roger—well, Roger continued to gather his rocks, but that’s Roger.

  My booth has mainly become a place where we keep extra towels. Destination Mars! sends us more towels than we need, and they’ve got to go somewhere.

  Also sometimes Jenny and I go in there and canoodle.

  And so somewhere along the line I forgot that I’m a psychologist. When you’re watching excitement and even alarming early violence, it kind of keeps you on task. But when it becomes the psychology of boredom, you might forget that you’re supposed to be doing it. Anyway I did. And what I was letting myself ignore was the fact that there was a lot more going on than boredom, actually.

  Now, though—Jenny’s pregnant now, and it’s so obviously affecting everybody that I can’t be in denial about it. There’s a lot to keep an eye on. The cameras are, in fact, back up and running. And on the morning when I wake up to see Trixie hovering over Jenny—and I sleep in the same tiny bunk as Jenny, so the hovering is kind of hard to miss—the way Trixie has been doing throughout the day lately, I know I’ve got to pick my mission up again.

  I tell Jenny about it when she’s awake—Trixie and the stethoscope. “Oh, boy,” Jenny says.

  “Everyone’s behaving kind of strangely,” I say.

  “It’s true.” She scratches at her messy hair. Jenny is still next to me in the bunk, but now it’s me hovering over her, up on one elbow. We are, as usual, the last ones out of bed.

  “I’m going to look into it,” I say.

  “You sound like a television detective,” she says, blinking at me.

  I consider that. “There are some TV shows where the detective is a psychologist.”

  “How are you doing with everything, Josh?” she asks me.

  “How are you doing?” I say.

  “Wow,” she says. “You really are on the job, huh?”

  I give Jenny a kind of salute. Which is awkward in a very tight bunk.

  Since I can’t really use my office and also I want to be a little more nonchalant about it, I do my eye-keeping out in the common spaces, where there are not so many towels.

  I start with some of the people who are having what look like sweet reactions. First of all, Roger. It’s almost like he’s nesting. Recently he sewed the baby three onesies, all by himself, using a couple of those extra Destination Mars! towels—and we didn’t even know he could sew! And then he made a rattle using a little plastic sampling bottle and some Mars pebbles. It seems like every day he’s working on something new for the baby.

  I go into the greenhouse, where he spends most of his time, because he’s our botanist in addition to being our geologist. I don’t really like to be in the greenhouse, to be honest, because it brings up old memories—Lil, my fiancée on Earth until that night of the car accident, gardened. But I’m back in the mode of keeping my eye on people, and Roger is in the greenhouse, so that’s where I go.

  It’s warm in here, and humid, the air thick with oxygen. Roger is at a workstation tucked away behind the crops. He works on his things there—plants, rocks, et cetera.

  “Hey,” I say.

  Roger startles. He startles pretty easily. “Oh—Josh. Hi, Josh.” There are vegetables in front of him, looking like they’ve been cooked, and some kitchen implements, and little jars.

  “Whatcha working on?” I say. Though honestly I can sort of already tell, and my insides are going Awwwwwwwww.

  Roger smiles a little, and scratches at his thinning hair. “I’m figuring out”—he says “out” in that Canadian accent that makes it sound like “oot”—“how to strain peas and spinach and then can them.”

  “For . . . baby food?” I say. This is what I mean by sweet. Though I know there’s more to it than sweetness. People always have their deeper reasons. But it’s also sweet.

  “Yeah,” he says, blushing a little. “I’m doing peas and spinach, and also radishes and tomatoes.”

  Those last two sound like question marks as far as baby taste buds are concerned, but I don’t want to quash his excitement, for sure. I pat him lightly on the shoulder. “You’re really getting into this,” I say. Which I mean partly as a question.

  “Well,” he says, in his soft-spoken way. “We all are, I think.”

  I smile and nod and study him a little. “Hey—why do they call it canning when you use jars?” I say.

  But Roger doesn’t know. I pat him lightly on the shoulder again—clapping him on the back might knock Roger over, is one thing you have to know about Roger—and leave him to his vegetables.

  When I tell Jenny about Roger and his baby food, she says, “Awwwwwwwww.”

  “I know,” I say. We’re getting our lunches ready. I put one last spread of peanut butter on the peanut butter half of my sandwich.

  Jenny, whose stomach is easily upset these days, is just toasting toast. Maybe she’ll do some margarine. After a few moments, she says, frowning a little, “I hope he’s careful about it. Is there botulism on Mars?”

  It’s hard to know. Mars is sort of a restart as far as diseases are concerned. If we didn’t bring it with us, it’s probably not here. But maybe we did bring it with us, or one of the supply rocket
s did, without meaning to.

  Trixie, who has come in to grab a bowl of cereal, says, “You never know. You should be very, very, very careful about home-canned foods. In fact, you probably shouldn’t eat them at all.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on it,” I say.

  “Detective mode,” Jenny says. “Psychologist-detective mode.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out, too,” Trixie says. I can see she’s about to reach for her stethoscope, so I unite the jelly half with the peanut butter half and lead Jenny out of there.

  Nicole’s gotten very family-oriented, too, in her way. Unlike the rest of us, she actually has a lot of relatives back on Earth—living parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins (first, second, etc., once removed, twice removed, unremoved, etc.), nieces, nephews, and so on. Which makes it sound nice. But Nicole describes her family as a “shitshow.” What stories I’ve gleaned from her back that description up. Which means that she came here in part in search of something better even among the six of us. And then she got bored of Mars like the rest of us, and we didn’t fill the void for her, which made her struggle with it more for a while, and then eventually she just settled into boredom like the rest of us. But it seems now the pregnancy’s brought the longing back again; the whole thing seems to have fired her up to make us more of a family here.