Sometimes the voice got on his nerves a little.
Eventually everyone else did make their way to the bunkroom and went to sleep. Everyone except Jenny, who Stefan knew had been sleeping on one of the chaises longues in the common room recently. As they all came in, Stefan kept his eyes closed and played the part of the resting angel as best he could. All the same, Nicole hovered over him for quite a while before she was somehow satisfied, and then she did something to his sleepsack—he felt her tug on it—and she finally settled into her own bunk.
The habitation center was then entirely dark. After a time, the night sounds started. Above the HVAC system—obliterating it, really—were the sounds of Trixie’s snoring. Nicole snored, too, but it was more of a purr, actually, and nothing like Trixie’s wood chipper. Stefan could only hear Nicole between Trixie’s giant and not-quite-rhythmic snarls, and in those same intervals he also heard some mumbling from Josh. Josh talked in his sleep not infrequently, though Stefan could never make out what he was saying. The man sleep-mumbled.
Together, an anti-symphony. Roger, at least, was habitually quiet.
Wide awake with no chance of passing out now, Stefan continued to think things through. He also checked his sleepsack, where Nicole had clipped a little motion sensor for which they had not ever found a use. Until this night. Stefan was its first use. And it was going a bit far, he thought—at his age he did get up multiple times in a night to use the lavatory, and doing so under these circumstances would have raised a clamor. He unclipped the device angrily but gently—engineer’s hands—and, again with some deft use of engineer’s hands, he disabled the thing, and in the dark, too.
Nice. You are good at this sort of thing.
Thanks, Stefan thought in return, still seething a bit about the motion sensor. They really did have it in for him.
Want to take a look at that carbon dioxide splitter?
Stefan thought, Why would I—
Listen, the voice said. There’s no harm in looking at it.
As he slipped out of the bunkroom toward the common room, the voice delivered a little speech. Things would be so orderly if it were only you, it said. Just saying. So neat and tidy and quiet. Everything in its place. Everything predictable. Everything would finally be in a Pattern again.
Stefan paused in his tracks, his hand on the metal corridor wall, standing in the darkness, and he thought something back. Wait—how do you know there isn’t already a Pattern? It was something Stefan had occasionally wondered—what if his fellow Marsonauts weren’t chaos but instead some more complicated machine of a thing that he hadn’t yet figured out?
There was a pause in return. And then, a voice that sounded a bit different: Yeah. We thought of that. It’s a head-scraper for sure. We think you would say head-scraper.
Head-scratcher, Stefan thought.
Anyway, said the original voice, better safe than sorry, as we think you say.
Maybe, came the different voice. It was almost like a separate speaker.
Stefan, old legume, the original voice said. These people would get rid of you if they could.
Would they? he thought.
It’s just a thought experiment. Unless you think your idea wouldn’t work.
The common room was dark, too, the only light coming from a few tiny indicator bulbs on one wall, so that Stefan wasn’t exactly sure how to proceed; Jenny had rearranged the furniture. He stood there and listened to the silence—Jenny made no sound when she slept. He waited for his eyes to respond to those few lumens in the room. When he had a very imperfect sense of where the main objects were, he took a few slow steps toward the airlock dome, and then a few more, and then he was across the room and out the other side.
At which point he stopped. Because there, in front of him, was Roger, sitting with his back against the airlock door. Eyes wide open.
Stefan shook his head. This was unexpected.
Roger stood up, and Stefan could see in the slightly better light of this room that he was holding two rather large rocks, one in each hand. “You’re not going out there,” Roger said, in a characteristically soft but unprecedentedly firm voice.
This is the one whose fingers you broke? came one of the voices.
“Yup,” Stefan said.
Well, the voice said, there’s a bit of nice symmetry there.
Roger had not moved or reacted to Stefan’s Yup.
“You’re going to hit me in the head with those rocks if I try to go out there,” Stefan said.
“I’m going to hit you in the head with these rocks if you try to go out there,” Roger agreed. Then he added, more quietly: “Also, I’ve been studying martial arts for a year.”
“What?” Stefan was at a loss.
“Well, I had to learn to protect myself,” he said pointedly.
Stefan could feel himself flushing a little with embarrassment, which was not a common experience for him. “When did you learn without anyone noticing?”
Roger shrugged. “People generally don’t come into the greenhouse.”
“Huh.” After a minute of taking all this in, he sat down on the floor opposite Roger, who also sat down again.
“Are people taking shifts trying to keep me from leaving?”
Roger shook his balding head. “Just me.”
“Just you,” Stefan said. “Wow.”
They sat like that, opposite each other, silently, for several minutes. It was a period of uncertainty, but also calm. Even the voices were quiet.
Then Roger said, “You know, I’m anxious about the baby coming, too. Nervous, I mean.”
Stefan blinked in surprise. Roger had spent the last month making baby food and booties and jumpers for the baby. “But you’ve spent the last month making baby food and booties and jumpers for the baby.”
Roger took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. “Well, I guess you have to do something with the nervous energy.”
“Nervous energy,” Stefan said.
Roger nodded. “I’m not actually really a people person. I was born and raised in the Yukon, and even that felt crowded sometimes,” he said. “Why do you think I came to Mars?”
Stefan gaped.
“And it’s already so busy here. It’s only going to get busier.”
This is pretty interesting, a voice said. The second, different one. It’s as though you’re the same, in a way.
“It is going to get crazier,” Stefan said. “It’s going to be lunacy. It’s going to be chaos. Total chaos.”
Oh, we don’t like that, said a voice that was more like the original voice.
“You’re both damn idiots,” came another voice. But Stefan recognized this one.
The lights snapped on, and—Stefan blinked in the lights—Jenny was standing at the door to the airlock dome, leaning against the jamb. Her curly black hair wild all around her face.
Are we going to do this thing or not? said the original voice, a little whinier than usual.
Let’s just see where this goes first, said the newer voice.
But. . . .
“Oh—hi,” Stefan said.
“Thank you for keeping watch, Roger,” Jenny said. One of her eyebrows went up. “Martial arts?”
Roger nodded shyly.
“For a year?”
He nodded again.
“Hm.” Jenny turned her attention to Stefan. “You realize you can’t go anywhere.”
Stefan was still processing the new Roger he was learning about, full of discipline and resolve, but he caught up to what Jenny was saying and retorted, “I can do what I want to do.”
“Not when it’s dangerous,” she said.
This was the same argument they’d all had after Stefan had broken Roger’s fingers. He felt everybody could do whatever they wanted—in retrospect, he realized he had mainly been interested in his b
eing able to do what he wanted, if he could only figure out what that was—and they disagreed. He’d lost the point that time.
But you don’t have to lose the point, this time, said the original voice. With a definite whine.
Shhh, said the other.
“You’ll be fine,” he said to Jenny. Though, he realized, they obviously would not be if he had done the thing at the splitter that he had been thought-experimenting about.
“We’ll be fine?” Jenny said. “Maybe. Maybe. But what about you?”
Wait—what?
“Do you have any idea what the radiation levels are out there? You know that lander isn’t shielded in the way that Home Sweet is. And food and water? Stefan—you dumbass—it’s not safe!”
“Wait,” Stefan said.
Wait, a voice said.
“You’re worried about me?”
Jenny exhaled an exasperated exhalation and threw her hands in the air. “Of course I’m worried about you. I’m worried about everybody. The baby, me, Josh, Roger—” she gestured at Roger—“everybody. Of course you!”
Huh, said the second voice.
Stefan had no idea what to do with this.
Us neither, honestly, came a mixture of the voices. That’s another head-scratcher.
“I don’t understand it myself. It’s as though I’m becoming the prototypical Earth mother,” she said, almost to herself, trying to tie her bathrobe over her considerable belly. “Mars mother. Whatever.”
Stefan glanced at Roger, who shrugged an I don’t know shrug.
“Is it hormones?” Stefan said.
“No, you dumbass,” Jenny snapped. “Well, perhaps somewhat. But it’s also because—do you know why I called you idiots?”
Stefan almost suggested hormones again, but then didn’t.
That’s a good call, came the second voice.
“Because this isn’t chaos,” she said, swirling her arm around in the light, indicating sort of everything. “You two are scientists. I would expect you to know better. This isn’t chaos.”
“It isn’t?” Roger asked in his tremulous voice.
Jenny threw her hands in the air, turned, and retreated into the common room, where she sat down on a chaise longue. And then, when the two men failed to follow her, she gestured impatiently, and they both got up and went in there. They sat together on a chaise longue right next to hers.
“This—” she swirled her hand around again—“is a very particular structure.”
Ooh, said the combined voice. We like the sound of that.
“Like a machine?” Stefan asked hopefully.
“No. Nicole said it first.” Jenny eyed both of the men. “This is a family.”
A family? the voice said. A family.
“Didn’t you two have childhoods? Families?” Jenny said. “This is how families are . . . loud, ridiculous, and on your nerves.” She looked off to the side and added, almost to herself, “And some are worse than that.” She turned back. “Some are a lot worse than this,” she said. “Do you know how damn fortunate you are?”
Stefan and Roger were more or less speechless.
“Do you?” Jenny leaned closer to them. “And you know what the thing is about this family? Nobody gets to opt out.”
Stefan was reeling to the point where all he could do was repeat things that Jenny said. “Nobody gets to opt out?”
“No,” she said.
There are rules here, the newer one said.
Could you guys leave me alone? Stefan thought to himself.
Hey, the original voice said. This is skully stuff for us, too. Or maybe you would say heady?
“Guys?” Jenny said.
“Guys? Oh,” Stefan said. “I’m just thinking.”
Her face softened. “I’m aware that things are crazy around here. And, like you said, the baby is going to make things much crazier.”
Stefan felt a pulse of anxiety at that statement.
Jenny put one hand on Stefan’s arm and another on Roger’s arm. “But maybe you could go back in your greenhouse to get some alone time when you need it,” she said to Roger, and then, squeezing Stefan’s arm, “and you could take walks, and perhaps the lander could be a kind of meditation studio that you could go to sometimes.”
Stefan thought about Guld and Fisk waiting back in the lander. Smiled.
“And perhaps we could have quiet hours, and less music,” Jenny said. “It gets on my nerves, too, sometimes.”
Stefan was absolutely gobsmacked. “And maybe people could pick up their socks?” he said. “And their rocks?”
Roger and Jenny both nodded. “That seems fairly reasonable,” she said. “The point is, if this is a family, your needs matter, too.”
“Our needs matter, too,” Stefan said.
“Okay,” Roger said.
“This Mars mother thing is . . . remarkable,” Stefan said.
Jenny laughed, and then Roger laughed, and Stefan chuckled a little. And then they all sat quietly together for a few moments.
“Do me a favor,” she said, and she took both men’s hands and placed them on her belly, where there was movement. This was remarkable in its own right. She looked at her belly and spoke to it. “This is your badass uncle Roger,” she said. Roger visibly blushed. “And this is your cranky uncle Stefan.”
“Cranky uncle,” Stefan said.
“Everyone needs a cranky uncle,” Roger said. “Mine was named Albert. Albert from Quebec.”
Maybe it was the voices getting less inciting, or maybe it was the fact that the two men were apparently both misanthropes, but right then Stefan didn’t want to hit Roger for saying that.
Maybe we need to take a little more time and think about things, said the newer voice.
You could think about something without doing something.
Ugh, said the original one, but in a tone of resignation.
The baby moved under Stefan’s hands. He looked up and he and Jenny stared into each other’s eyes for a minute. Movement, movement, movement. It wasn’t so bad, right then. Plus Stefan would have his meditation studio. Without the pressure of the voices, it was seeming increasingly extreme—deranged, in point of fact—the thought experiment he’d been thought-experimenting a surprisingly short time ago. He shuddered when he thought of it. But then he absorbed this movement under his hand and let go of that derangement.
Because thoughts were just thoughts, and actions were something else.
And then something seismic happened in Jenny’s belly, and the men let go and her face went very WOW.
“What was that?” Roger said, sitting back.
“That,” Jenny said, “was a contraction. I think that was a contraction.”
“A contraction?” Stefan repeated.
“Get Josh,” she said. “Get Trixie and Nicole.”
“Get Josh,” Stefan said. “Get Trixie and Nicole.”
“Get them,” Jenny said with some intensity.
And then Stefan and Roger were up and going, racing down the corridor. If he had been able to stop and reflect, Stefan would have realized that he was definitely excited, with all the complexity that a word like that contains.
Well, a unified voice said, sounding curious. Here we go.
What You Can’t Do (Part Two)
(Section 4 of the unofficial Destination Mars! handbook, as written by the founder of Destination Mars!)
Subsection 4:2: Biological Issues
Of course the social issues surrounding sex are only the beginning. The biological issues, at least in the case of heterosexual intercourse, are scarier still. (We considered sending only LGBTQ astronauts to Mars, but sexuality can be pretty fluid, so ultimately it seemed pointless.) You will, as you know, be submitting to operations intended to make it impossible to reproduce, but we know that no
procedure is entirely infallible, and even the remote possibility of a pregnancy is so concerning that we need to take every precaution to avoid it. We detail the medical risks below, but they boil down to this: sex may feel good now, but it’s probably going to feel terrible later, when a deformed baby is produced—and when it dies, along with the mother, in childbirth.
More specifically:
Do you know how much radiation is going to be hitting you?On the trip through space it’s going to be a lot. A LOT. Not that you’re going to be unsafe; we can protect grownups. (NOTE that this is not a legal guarantee.) Fetuses, on the other hand? We make no claims about fetus safety at all. Radiation is basically a nightmare when a human is under construction. Think failure to implant; think cell destruction; organ destruction; limits to fetal growth; miscarriage; malformations; major post-natal neurological and motor deficits. Think cancer; think death.
So that’s the rocket, which is very, very dangerous. But even on the planet, which has an atmosphere to block some of the radiation, you’re still getting a lot more than you would on Earth. Maybe not capital letters a lot, but still too much. So the same concerns basically apply.
In other words, are you a big fan of birth defects? Or death?
Do you ever think about bone density and how it’s lower in places with lower gravity, such as a certain red planet we could easily name? Well, you should think about it. Adults can handle this okay with proper exercise and milk and vitamin supplements and so on (see Section 22 on keeping fit), but what about babies? Nobody knows. But we can speculate: if you have a baby, you might end up having a baby with fragile little bird bones. This sounds cute. It isn’t cute.
Plus, some scientists say that low gravity is bad for stem cells, which are important enough to be called stem cells.
Have you ever heard of fluid distribution? As in, you’re supposed to have your bodily fluids distributed in a good way throughout your body? Well, gravity plays a role there, too. Imagine a baby with very awkward fluid distribution. Maybe all of the fluid is to the left, or maybe in one leg. This is your baby.
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