The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  What would it mean to be truly free on the Red Planet, fellow Martians? We have seen the worst that freedom brings, when one of our number runs amok and sacrifices another of our beloved brothers! Freedom, when it is simply the freedom to be a shareholder in a mercantile entity that is no longer beholden to any government, is not freedom! It is a form of interstellar slavery! Martian freedom must be designed on Mars, by Martians, for Martians, and it must reflect the difficulty of our terrain, the modesty of our resources, and the sense of community that we bring to the project of establishing a new human civilization! Think of what the revolutionaries of our own planet accomplished, in France, the United States, Bali, Kazakhstan. Mars must reject Earth in exactly these ways!

  And so, fellow Martians, I bring to you today the first of my meditations on the history and economics of the Martian colony. By the power vested in me at the Greenhouse dinner of January seventh, two thousand and twenty-six, I hereby declare the socialization of and communal ownership of all the infrastructure on the planet Mars. I hereby declare that private property, the antagonist of any community in the process of finding its footing, is abolished. I declare that while the trinkets and memorabilia of our old lives are useful as mementos, we hold that the majority of our lives are lived in this community, with these people, and as such, the objects that pass between people are held to be our common property. Among this common property will be the electrical power generated by all of us, among this common property will be the food that we grow in or out of our greenhouse, among this common property will be the literary accounts that we generate in this place for sale back on the mother planet, in whatever form these sales might take place, a portion of which will always be kicked into a common kitty by the author of these works, such as the author of this memo on Martian property rights. Any minerals that we locate here, including diamonds, platinum, gold, and any other valuable minerals, will be the common property of the Martian colony. Any film rights that we sell, pursuant to our stories on the planet Mars, will be held to be common property, in which we all share equally. Children born in the Martian colony will be considered the nieces and nephews of all adults in the Martian colony. Dinner will be cooked serially by all Martian adults, on a rotating basis, unless the colony specifically decides to cancel dinner plans. From each, therefore, according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

  We hold that these principles of common trust are based upon our lives on this planet thus far, and that they are therefore organic to our experiences as Martians. They conform to the principles of our Mars First! political entity, which, at the present time, is the only political party on the planet Mars. This is not to say that Mars First! is averse to sharing power with any other parties that are liable to emerge at some future date. We are against military actions, except when we understand a need to defend ourselves and our common property. We have no prison and we have no death penalty. Public service on the planet Mars is to be carried out on a rotating basis, and according to rigorous standards of public service. When our term is over we shall hand over the reins of power to the next volunteer or group of volunteers.

  These are our beliefs, which we hold to be self-evident, until such time as we may find reason to amend them! Mars first! Mars always and ever!

  How, you might ask, did Jim Rose come to author these memorable lines, which have already gone down in the history of the Mars colony as the first of our constitutional documents? In the weeks after José’s murder, the remaining members of the Mars colony spiraled further down into the quiescent pall I’ve described above. Abu was working on his sculptures, out in back of the generating plant. Laurie (who was, as I’ve said, beginning to show) and Arnie retreated into their botanical endeavors, almost always finding reasons to cancel dinner on us and leave us to fend for ourselves with the rations we had remaining. Steve apparently stayed in his bunk four or five days at a time. Then there were Jim and me.

  What Jim decided to do, in lieu of pursuing much of a relationship with me, was go out and see the world. I think it was only three or four days after Brandon’s rampage that I helped him to haul the ultralight out of the Excelsior again, in order to get the thing up and running. Jim was handy with all machineries, and as I have said, he was a very good pilot. We used the onboard hydraulics to lower gently the ultralight to the floor of the planet, and then Jim set about trying to clear enough rubble out of the way that he might have a reasonable runway for the craft.

  I should point out that in the days that had intervened, I, for one, continued to track Brandon, using the device that was affixed to his rover. It was at this point that he did seem, at last, to descend into the mouth of the Valles Marineris, that immense geological formation, no doubt in the process exploring for water, life, bacteria, and all the ready-to-be-plundered resources that the mother planet was happy to have shipped back to her. Brandon’s movements, as I conceived of them from the Excelsior, were anything but faint of heart. It was as if, by neutralizing José, he had, indeed, surmounted the biggest of his problems, and was now safely at work on a task ordered directly from the USA. His industry suggested that we might, at some point, have the element of surprise where Brandon was concerned.

  Jim wanted to keep it this way. But he still needed to be certain that the ultralight was mission ready, and that he’d be able to land it on the rocky terrain near the canyon without turning it into a pile of scrap. And so he resolved to set off in a southerly direction. A curious way to go, kids, because the south, like the poles, to which we would not have access because of the distance, just didn’t have much to offer, besides some dry ice. Not like the outflow channels at the eastern end of Valles Marineris, where Brandon had lately pitched his camp. Nevertheless, the impact basin nearby, Argyre, also presented, according to geologists on the home planet, the great likelihood of water ice. And any trip to Argyre kept us far away from Brandon.

  It was a risk to fly the craft in a direction where none of us could help Jim in the event of difficulty. And NASA would have been the first to advise against it, had we been in a mood to listen to their point of view (since their unpleasant broadcast memorial to José, which had run on the web in the days after his demise). They were no longer telling us what to do and were beginning to recognize, I think, that we had long ago assumed responsibility for ourselves. We offered very little in the way of specifics to Mission Control.

  It may have been true that Jim Rose wanted the emptiness and the experience of tundra. The Martian emptiness was more empty than any other emptiness. I made Jim promise to take a video camera, however, in case he resolved some of the scientific problems that were much on our minds.

  I met him by the aircraft, and in the new post-sentimental environment occupied by the inhabitants of the Excelsior, I offered him the meal I had packed, which was some repulsive mixture of cream cheese, freeze-dried olive paste, candy bars, and a bottle of water, not something, I suppose, that he would like, with his finicky tastes, but food nonetheless. I advised against eating it all at once.

  “And don’t forget the video.”

  It was early morning, and he would have the hazy sun on his left as he flew south.

  “I won’t. And you’re going to continue to keep an eye on Brandon.”

  I nodded, withdrawing slightly. Perhaps I was right to do so. Maybe I knew the burden that Jim carried with him on that trip, in which he became the fulcrum for all that would happen on Mars in the future, the Mars of your generation, the Mars to come. Maybe I knew, likewise, that it wasn’t likely that Brandon was just going to give up harrowing the rest of us. Nor was it the case that M. thanatobacillus, once exposed by José, was going back into its hiding place beneath the surface of the interplanetary imagination.

  There was no wind. Jim managed, despite a few remaining boulders on our makeshift runway, to get the ultralight aloft, and because we had left it out for a day or so, there was enough juice in the solar cells for him to make the trip with minimal expenditure of solid fuel. He
banked left, out above the dunes, as though surfing on their crests. I don’t know how far off, because distances were lost to me. Then he headed out of my view, bound for the Argyre Basin.

  The ultralight was equipped with a camera too, so as long as he was near enough to transmit to the little broadcasting antenna we’d erected on the roof of the Excelsior, he could send back fuzzy real-time footage of the terrain beneath him. Though I had seen Mars from above, as had all of us, it had been some time since the landing, and being elevated enough to look beyond the lip of the horizon was glorious and implicitly hazardous. What looked unvarying at first sight, the ferrous red and battleship gray of the surface, had grown in our time here much more complicated. There were all manner of strange geological formulations passing beneath Jim. I watched until the transmission began to break up, until grids of digital static broke through it and he was gone.

  What we now know, kids, is that this was the moment in the wilderness when Jim Rose, free of the shackles of his fellow Martians, had the experience of being one with the new planet. This was the moment. He’d been flying for a couple of hours, as I understand it, before he saw the impact basin beneath him, the collapsed wall on the north side that was said to be the route through which the Argyre emptied its primordial flood upon the lowlands. We now know that Jim piloted his ultralight just south of the collapsed wall, and finding that the land was smoother here than elsewhere—because the Argyre was of a more recent vintage, as far as asteroid strikes go—he set the plane down without incident. Once on the ground, Jim made some kind of feeble and perhaps awkward obeisance in the direction of the planetary spirit of Mars, because this was how he was in those days. He thanked Mars for bringing him to this spot without incident, and then he got a pickax out of the back of the ultralight. Think of it, kids, Jim Rose sweating through his space suit, digging. We had just dug a grave, farther north, you see. Graves were on our minds. My mind, at any rate. We’d dug a grave because we had nothing else to do with José’s body, because there were no vultures to pick him apart, and there was no incinerator, yet, in which to put his body, and, as I’ve said, given the natural refrigeration of the planet Mars, if we had left him out in a crater, it was likely that his body would have remained in a mild state of decomposition for a very long time. So we buried him.

  In the process of burying José we did soil tests, as we always did. And this process had not yielded any irrefutable data yet, though Steve had preserved an ambiguous sample of the dirt several feet down and taken it back toward the power plant for more testing. Whatever Steve may or may not have found was completely different from what was at Argyre. At Argyre, kids, there was a bounty in the regolith. The bounty was not even far below the surface. The bounty was there waiting to be harvested, as though the destitute face that Mars presented to the heavens, to the orbiting crafts, to the unmanned missions that had landed here in the past fifteen or twenty years, was completely fraudulent, deliberately so. Jim wasn’t even six feet down when, making use of an electrical coil he’d patched together back at the Excelsior, he melted himself a cup full of water.

  Water! That tasteless (or mostly tasteless), odorless (or mostly odorless) fortification that makes up the vast majority of our physique. Call it a long cool drink, call it rehydrating, call it an adulteration, it was the thing that made Earth, the watery planet, what it was, a teeming, complicated celebration of organics. It was the first requirement for life! And here it was! Frozen into the subsoil on Mars in a way in which just about anyone could get to it, if only he were willing to dig. Some of the unmanned Mars missions had come tantalizingly close, but they’d found mere traces of H2O in places where it was inefficient (by reason of landscape) to harvest it, or where it was evaporated quickly. We had set our ships down in just such a landscape. A deserted part of a desert planet.

  Which did make you wonder why. Why we were originally slated for the South Pole, not that much farther south than the Argyre Basin, where there was definitely some kind of ice, mostly liquid CO2, which can be made, at least, to yield its oxygen without too much chemical manipulating. Why we were not there now, when to be there would have amounted to a self-sustaining Martian community, if a very cold one, unless NASA really did have some kind of objective that they were not telling us about. An objective that involved, however disagreeably, a piecemeal elimination of Mars mission astronauts, so as to preserve resources—water and power—for the trip home.

  This conspiracy mongering came easily to me on the day that I was alone in the Excelsior. Jim, as we learned later, was at the same time blowtorching and harvesting a container of water for himself from the humus of the Martian subsurface, and when he had produced a sufficient amount, he actually—though it was against regulations to do so—drank some of this water.

  Let us pause here. Because it was a horrible idea. Anyone on the mission would have told him as much, as indeed would have any scientist from home. We assumed that the surface of Mars was largely sterile, because of samples we’d taken, now and in the past, but where Jim had dug was not the surface, and what happened underneath the surface we just didn’t know! And yet Jim, in the wilderness, wanted to trust Mars, wanted to prove himself to it, that superficially empty place. He wanted Mars to know we were somehow worthy of her. He had been planning as much, I learned later, all along. He needed to be alone with Mars. And he needed to do this, to drink what the planet offered him, because at that moment he had a vision for the future of the planet. He drank, sacramentally, to punctuate this moment. He didn’t know, initially, if he had imbibed trace radioactive elements. He didn’t know if he had exceeded his recommended daily allowance for iron or lead. I, for one, almost always carried a Geiger counter with me, to keep a tally of exposure, but not Jim. Jim, according to the story as it has been handed down, drank deeply of the water, dried his mouth with the back of his hand before closing his visor again, and, according to this tale as we know it, he then said, aloud, to himself, “This is where I will live and die, in order to make this a better place than the planet from which I come.”

  What a solitary and terrifying thought. This man had family at home. He had friends who loved him and who, while admiring of his courage, were expecting him back at some point. How shall we interpret this moment? you ask. He didn’t see any god. He wasn’t hallucinating. He was being pragmatic. As pragmatic as one can be when one has interplanetary disinhibitory disorder. What Jim felt, in the absence of a beneficent and loving entity who would, back on Earth, help him to win big at the lottery or find a parking space, was a tremendous reassurance in the pristine silence of the Argyre Basin. It would be all right. He filled a metal container with water, put it in the small storage hatch in the ultralight, and when he was through with his sacrament, he lifted off again. Did Brandon take the bait? Was he somehow monitoring our activities too, and making note of our progress in the south?

  Meanwhile, I should add, my wife was contacting me from Earth:

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: Jed, are you there? We’re getting the most horrible news down here about the mission. None of it in the press yet, but still. People are saying things. They’re saying that there is trouble on Mars, that someone may even have been murdered. Is that true?

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Pogey, I’m not at liberty to discuss Martian internal affairs. You know that.

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: Jed, it’s me. You don’t have to give me the party line. I get enough of that down here. Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on? Is everyone okay? Are you okay?

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: It’s impossible to explain what’s going on here, that’s all I can say. It’s not like Earth. It’s a different place. The language is changing already. The language already applies to Martian things in different ways. I don’t know if I can tell you in a way that will make sense. We belong to a different planet, whose culture is rapidly evolving in ways that will be hard to understand back on the home planet. Our ethics and legal system are already beginning
to diverge.

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: I really hate it when you say I can’t understand things. It’s so condescending. But it’s not really for myself that I’m asking anyway. I’m worried about Ginger. She hears things around. At school, on the base (when she’s there), she doesn’t know what to think. She’s mostly too independent to ask you these kinds of things herself, or that’s what I think. But she wants to know. I think you ought to talk to her. More than you’re doing now.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Well, I’m fine. That’s all she needs to know. I can’t run the risk that our communications are being monitored by Mission Control. I’m sure they are, as a matter of fact. We intend to solve the issues, the problems, internally, the ones you’re alluding to. There’s a lot going on, and the situation is fluid, changing by the day. If you can give me a sign that you are you, and that you are not being used by other people at this moment, I can reassure you a little bit. So maybe you can remind me about the illustration on your lower back?

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: The tattoo?

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Don’t waste time with two-word responses.

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: St. Theresa in ecstasy. Like the sculpture.

  RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Why did you leave your husband?

  PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: What do you mean? I left my husband because he left me. Long ago. In all the symbolic ways. If you really want to know, if this is really how you want to deal with this question now, I’ll say that my husband is so broken, so lost, that he’s incapable of opening up to anyone on Earth, least of all me. So I hope he is better at opening up to people on Mars. His impenetrability makes him very effective at certain kinds of military operations, where human emotions just clog up the system. Where emotions just get in the way of things. There was a time when I was able to see through all this to the person within him. Then he felt exposed, he didn’t want me, he walled himself off, he was too walled off to be able to want me.