The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  So how then could I feel, as my first foot hit the first rung of the ladder from which I would descend onto the surface of that other planet, that I had somehow come home? What did it mean to come home, if home were a place with subzero temperatures year-round, very little water, very little oxygen, and in all likelihood, no significant life of any kind?

  Nevertheless, this is what I felt, that this place, this wasteland, was the place that I was coming back to. My one genuine home. I suppose, as I climbed down yet another of the five rungs it would take me to get to the “flags and footprints” portion of the mission, that I did have a revelatory moment, and that the nature of this revelation was along the following lines: there is no natural order, if the natural order means the way things go on the home planet. The home planet is where things started. I’ll grant this. But that does not necessarily constitute a natural order. The natural order is the wild, violent, unpredictable world of space, with its wormholes, dark matter, black holes, space-time curvature, and in this natural order, human ethics, puny human ethics, mean nothing. Human morality, confined to a minute portion of the universe, is statistically insignificant. I felt more comfortable in a landscape devoid of such niceties. Accordingly, I hopped down the last rung of the ladder and landed on a barren patch, with rocks surrounding me on all sides. I unfurled the flag, which, unlike on the moon, had no trouble blowing in the Martian breeze.

  “Houston?” I said, opening the channel on the intercom, onto billions upon billions of desperate, squinting, diarrhetic, miserable, disenfranchised people clamoring for a better way of life. “Houston, it is a beautiful day in the neighborhood.”

  January 14, 2026

  Ever since the landing, NASA has tried to impose order on the Martian base. The Martian base has resisted at every turn. The Martian base represents a truly new and truly different way of thinking about the inevitable human diaspora. As a result of this, kids, they have put an end to my diary, after the escalating complaints, and you are no longer receiving anything from me, not even the heavily edited posts that I had come to appreciate so, where my every negative thought (and I have a lot of negative thoughts) had been sanitized and replaced with bright, sparkly bulletins that did everything but shill for our myriad official corporate suppliers. Well, that diary is a thing of the past. And so I write these lines for history, kids, and for the idea that one day the truth will be known. I believe my writings will be read a thousand years from now, when human populations, with wildly varying customs and languages and belief systems, are spread far and wide, as the first theoretical writings to advocate for interplanetary philosophical positions, and so I am patient. If by the time you read these lines you are grandparents, so be it.

  The Geronimo landed on schedule, only about fifteen kilometers from the reactor that they were intended to use as their base. And the Pequod landed six hours after that, finding a spot in the base of a crater where the air pressure was slightly higher and where they would be shielded from the worst of the local storms. We all got our ham radio sets working properly and were able to get in contact with one another quickly. Here we were!

  The first project involved our driving all the plant life over to the greenhouse and beginning the process of vegetating the Mars colony. The guys from the Geronimo had fewer plants, because they were carrying a lot of liquid hydrogen for the reactor, but they brought what they had. As did we. We were to meet in the crater that afternoon. The Excelsior had been outfitted with a deluxe rover that was pressurized, so that this vehicle could serve as an additional cabin if others failed. Accordingly, it wasn’t a problem for us to get to the greenhouse quickly. We had some fuel, and there were solar panels—the rover was designed to be able to travel a thousand kilometers or more on one tank of fuel. When we went over a hilltop, we marked this topographical wonder by bestowing upon it a solar-powered radio beacon. As though we could map every feature in this tiny triangle of the Mars colony.

  It was about seven days in, therefore, before the entire Mars mission was in one spot, together. We had our portional moments of confraternity, and we engaged in our appointed tasks, of which much more below. But on the seventh day the Mars colony experienced itself as a community. This meeting was not to the liking of everyone. As you’ll recall, Brandon Lepper had charges proffered against him by Laurie Corelli, leading to the daring midair prisoner exchange, when Debbie Quartz was lost. Still unanswered was the question of whether Debbie had somehow been forced into the heavens by Brandon. Meanwhile, none of the astronauts from the Pequod knew the entire story about José Rodrigues and his injuries, except what they may have heard from Houston. And yet, as I have already implied, once the Mars colony began to experience itself as the future of humankind, rather than as some military-industrial corporate stunt, it became less and less important to us what Houston thought.

  Upon arrival, Laurie invited us into the greenhouse, and José, without his crutches, managed to carry in some flats of plants. José was basically using a walking cast now, and, because of diminished gravity, was making fine progress. The guys from the Geronimo arrived soon after. At which point, at last, after more than three months, the eight of us were gathered around a table—seven men and one woman. It was Laurie who first spoke up.

  Laurie said, “Requests from the menu?”

  “I was thinking about having the Dover sole,” Arnie said, with an ease that probably came from the fact that he was already her confederate, if not more.

  “Dover sole!” I cried. “If only we were going to dig up Dover sole down there in the canyon. If only there were going to be fish in some of the dry ice.”

  “Atlantic salmon,” said Jim. “Or bluefish. Or haddock. Do haddock still exist?”

  Steve and Abu sat off to one side, looking as though they carried a dark burden. It was only when Abu volunteered to help me with some more botanical transplanting from the Excelsior that the tip of the iceberg drifted ominously into view. We both redonned our helmets, though probably if you ran fast enough to and from craft to base, you needn’t worry unduly about the climate, or at least not about instant death from the 95 percent carbon dioxide and only 0.13 percent oxygen. The rover was only ten or fifteen yards from the greenhouse, but we wore our helmets, then set them aside and fell into a debrief.

  “I don’t want to sugarcoat it,” he said. “We have a problem. With Brandon. We have a very, very serious problem.”

  Which somehow was exactly where we would come out in this particular conversation.

  “And what kind of problem is that?”

  “We never got comfortable with the guy, Jed, the whole rest of the trip out. In fact, Steve and I never allowed ourselves to go to sleep at the same time. I don’t even know where to start. There’s just some very strange stuff coming off him all the time. Makes you not want to trust him. At all. He ate food reserves and lied about it. He read our journals, our private mail, whenever he had the chance. He seemed to be taking what he called dietary supplements of some kind, probably more serious drugs, HGH in a base of pituitary enhancers or what have you. He had communications from Houston that no one else knew anything about. He made remarks about how certain people on the mission were definitely expendable, all of that, and that there was no way the return vehicle could fit eight of us, and it was never intended to.”

  I said, “I guess we know that when Laurie wanted him off the Pequod she wasn’t imagining anything.”

  “Sexual coercion would probably be natural for him. I mean, maybe this all sounds like mild sociopathy. But I wouldn’t want to rule out stuff like sadism and espionage and conspiracy. But the thing I should tell you, I guess, is that one of the people he seemed most convinced was expendable was José. He just wouldn’t stop trash-talking.”

  “José?”

  “Maybe it has to do with the alternate landing coordinates, the Valles Marineris; maybe there’s some kind of objective that the science officers were meant to collaborate on. Brandon wants the entire project to himself. Or that�
��s what I imagine I’m understanding from what he’s been saying.”

  “José’s just not going to be able to get very far, if Brandon comes after him.”

  “True. We’re keeping an eye on Brandon for now. But I don’t feel it’s a guarantee that we can do that around the clock, now that we’re not locked in the capsules, completely isolated from one another. What happens if he follows through on this stuff? We have no court in place to deal with violent crimes. I’d feel demoralized if I had to conclude that with only eight astronauts we’ve already managed to bring all our worst earthly problems with us. And here’s an even worse thought: What if Debbie would still be alive somehow, if it weren’t for him?”

  We’d begun putting our helmets on again, so as to avoid being gone for too long. If I was vague about the conversation that came next, perhaps it was simply because I didn’t know who to trust yet, not with the closely held pieces of the story. It seemed that trust, in fact, was one of the first casualties of Mars exploration.

  “Abu, we just don’t really know what it means to be so far from the home planet. We don’t know yet what kinds of trouble long-term planetary exile can create. I feel like we’re only beginning to understand.”

  “I was out there,” Abu said. “I was on the space walk. I was there that day. There was something about it that was even worse than you think. From the beginning, when I got him into the Geronimo, he had this look in his eyes. A primal look, merciless even, like he was on the mission precisely because someone had to have no compassion of any kind. It occurred to me that maybe the personnel people wanted a guy like this. Maybe they had a reason.”

  “What are you trying to—”

  “I’m just thinking aloud. Except I know I don’t trust the guy. I guess what I’m saying is keep an eye on José. While you still can.”

  “Well, he’s been behaving erratically since the orbital insertion. It’s odd. He’s lost his edge. But in a good way. I never used to like the guy.”

  We closed tight the doors on the rover. The vehicle was already dusty and orange. The tires were already caked with the thin topsoil of the Red Planet. The rover didn’t go fast, and it wasn’t pretty, but it was reliable. And it was ours. The only complicated part of it was the oxygen supply couplings and the tanks that we had to lug on the back in the course of a journey.

  Once outdoors, I piled him down with genetically modified wheat that one of the large corporations had been working on for the launch. It was meant to grow in extremely dry environments, in landscapes with lots of iron in the soil, and it had a very long growing season. Since we were here for the two warmest seasons (roughly six Earth months each), if we could get this stuff to grow in the mixture of nutrient-rich earth and the Martian topsoil we were going to start introducing into the greenhouse, then we could be harvesting the wheat for the better part of the year, which meant that we could make bread, that staple of all evolving human civilizations. Then we could leave the plants for whoever came next.

  If anyone came next.

  Abu carried the flats of wheat into the back of the greenhouse, and I followed with the soybean plants. We carted in the flats, and again I was impressed with the scale of Laurie and Arnie’s botanical experiment. Most of the plants were still alive. In discrete biomes, sealed off with some plastic sheeting from the habitable living quarters, though some of the oxygen they were producing was, theoretically, being recirculated too, through the HVAC system.

  Back in the habitable partition, an awkward silence had risen up and crested over the heads of the Mars mission astronauts. Apparently, there had been brief attempts to re-create an attitude of collegiality, but these attempts had not been terribly effective. Jim was bantering with Steve, and they were discussing issues relating to the reactor and whether the dust in the Martian air, through the agency of the winds, was clogging any of the turbines there. Steve was such an important member of the mission. He was sturdy, thoughtful, and totally humorless. If there was one astronaut who seemed entirely free of Planetary Exile Syndrome, it was Steve Watanabe. Though of course it was also possible that I just didn’t know him yet, at least not the Martian Steve.

  Once we returned, Laurie brought out the rehydrated meal packets, which we no longer had to serve in pouches, and this alone amounted to culinary liberation. Also, the food was piping hot, and we shared it in portions that were a bit less stingy than during the voyage from Earth. Arnie had also begun testing a regional delicacy, Martian salt, which could be easily mined from the surface of the planet. This we used as a seasoning at table.

  “I precipitate it out during my geological tests,” Arnie said, brandishing a rather provisional-looking vial fashioned from scrap metal. “As you know, the water that at one time covered portions of the planet, including, I think, the crater where we are located, was very brackish, like in your most redolent earthly tidal marsh. It makes for a rather smoky table salt.”

  José, who was lately mostly unaware of the conversation taking place around him, launched into his repast first, without waiting for Martian grace, a feature of our meals that Laurie had been proposing on a ship’s log we’d all received on our clipboards: a gratitude for the fact we had now been here for a week, were moving toward self-sufficiency, and were less beholden to the pencil pushers in Houston than ever before. José’s very simplicity, his guileless appetites, brightened the mood in the room.

  “Oh man, Arnie,” he said, “this salt is, well, out of this world.”

  “It isn’t what you’d get back home.”

  “Sure it’s sterile?” I asked, before upending the shaker on my own rehydrated chipped beef.

  “We’re talking about the uppermost six inches of topsoil,” Arnie said. “There has been no Martian soil sample in the last twenty years that indicated biological compounds. It’s totally safe. Besides, I cooked it some. I’ve been using it for three or four days.”

  We even, on the occasion of this first dinner together, harvested a tiny bit of lettuce from the greenhouse. It was the first fresh roughage that any of us had processed in many weeks.

  Eventually, the conversation was bound to move in a more serious direction. It was Jim who suggested the topic. He was such a group leader. He was able to forge something from our disparate allegiances and talents so that we might proceed.

  “Men and woman of the Mars colony,” he therefore said. “It’s our first night together, on the surface of this new human outpost, and so I do propose a toast.”

  Did I say that we were already trying to ferment beverages? I don’t know about the rest of them, but I was eager, once we had touched down, to see if there were items that we could expose to our rather substantial and self-perpetuating colony of yeast, one of the very first Earth organisms to be introduced into the Martian wild (whether NASA wanted it or not). I sort of thought of myself as the Mars colony sommelier, and so that night I served up a little meadlike beverage that I had been working on in the privacy of the Excelsior, with some grain from the storeroom. I can’t say that I had quite perfected it, but the other astronauts were willing to give it a try. Jim raised up a thimbleful of it in a beaker.

  “What we did before,” he started in, “is unimportant. How we conducted ourselves on the home planet is unimportant. Our age, our economic station, our beliefs, our gender, our sexuality: unimportant. Our past successes are as unimportant as our mistakes. What we did for the good of the Earth community is no longer as important as what we do for the Martian community. Our mission objectives are changed as of this moment. I would like to try to address our new objectives. As I see it, our mission intends the establishment of a planet free of internecine conflict, selfishness, depletion of natural resources, exploitation of labor. Here there are no laws but the laws of mutual respect and indebtedness. We trade with one another, we don’t practice loans with interest, we don’t recognize an institutionalized religion, excepting the religion of interplanetary exploration, nor do we require laws that regulate private conduct. Our common purpo
se should be the perpetuation of a new chapter of human history. We believe in the robust health of the Martian colony. And that’s to say that the Red Planet is ours!”

  We all raised up our mead, and we swallowed it down, and it tasted a little bit like the cleaning solution that we used for scouring some of the rover’s engine parts. But it had a pretty good kick to it. I could feel, with the acetone bite in my stomach, that I wanted Jim Rose again, as I had done since our brief assignation. Our love moved in me with ever-widening pulsations. In this instance, however, it was enough to watch him and to marvel at his political instincts.

  “With that said,” he went on, “I think it would be useful to try to come up with some ideas about how to use what we have here in the coming days. We have the ultralight aircraft, and we are here at the edge of the largest known canyon in the universe. Leaving aside, if we are able, NASA’s expectations, the canyon is worth a look from a scientific perspective. It’s also for us to wonder at. I’d like to entertain suggestions about how we might proceed.”

  There was silence for a moment. The clank of metal flatware on military mess kits. José’s head came up from his chow long enough to add to the conversation. His was a non sequitur that I almost immediately wished had gone unreported.

  “Hey, Arnie, I’m really feeling like some of my memory is starting to come back.”

  “That’s great, José,” Arnie said. “I’m sure you can count on more improvement. And what are you remembering so far? Short-term memories? Are you able to recall distant events from your childhood?”