by Unknown
The truth was that Raphaella had declined to attempt the operation for two reasons, one good and one bad. The good reason was that kidney stone surgery was basically unnecessary. First do no harm. The bad reason was that she was afraid of fucking up on television.
For this reason, among others, she did not share Deet’s distress at the loss of the HGAS. Without the radio she already felt freer, able to bask in the vastness of Mars without worrying about her public image. The pressure to perform had come to feel like low-grade mental nausea. Now it was gone.
Finished digging, she pedalled on the stationary bike while the Roquentin’s water extractor farted away. She wasn’t risking muscular atrophy. Deet hadn’t been exercising; he’d be sorry. She then wrapped weights around her legs and did pull-ups. The cabin of the Roquentin was pressurized and spacious, compared to the hab. Beneath her feet, LED growlights shone bluey-white. The farm occupied most of what had been the aft bulkhead while they were in transit, and was now the floor: a mass of mini-polytunnels jammed into the available space like intestines in an abdominal cavity. Raphaella gloated over the plants beneath the plastic. If you’d told her a year ago that the thought of crisp alfalfa sprouts would make her mouth water, she’d have laughed.
The top of each pull-up brought the external monitors into her field of vision. On her sixty-seventh rep, she saw a fleck of dirt on the central monitor. Next rep, it had vanished. Thirty seconds later it was back in a slightly different place.
She orangutaned across the cabin to the camera controls, applied maximum magnification. No room for doubt. It was Rover 1, with Sanjiv and Mary in it. Popping in and out of view, traversing the aeolian undulations that wrinkled the apparently featureless polar plateau.
But were they returning, or going further away?
She hung in front of the monitors, biting her fingernails.
Going further away.
The rover vanished again, and failed to reappear.
Without warning, a cloud burst from the skyline. It looked like an explosion on telly. Higher and higher it mounted until it obscured the sun.
“Oh fuck,” Raphaella said.
She watched the monitors a little longer. Replayed the video, confirming what she had seen.
Then she swung over to the comms console. It was still a bit early. She took her time dialing into the relay frequency.
At twelve minutes before Martian noon, the moon Phobos rose, and the Roquentin’s radio came alive. “Yo. Raphaella. You copy?”
“Loud and clear, Zeke,” she said. “You’re not going to believe what just happened.”
This was Raphaella’s sanity loophole. The Roquentin was equipped with a UHF antenna in addition to the HGAS, intended for communicating with the rovers. Without a relay satellite, it could not transmit to Earth. But while Phobos was above the horizon, Raphaella could talk to Zeke and his colleagues on the little potato-shaped moon where the Mormon-funded expedition had set up camp. They could even patch her through to the Chinese in Gale Crater. Sanjiv hadn’t had a clue about that.
She told Zeke what she’d just seen. “Sanjiv and Mary tried to drive down the scarp. I think they triggered an avalanche.”
“Holy cow.”
“Yeah. They probably didn’t survive. But we can’t be sure, can we? And I can’t go looking for them. We’ve only got the one rover left. So what I was thinking is, we should ask the Chinese to send out a search party.”
“They’re a long way away from you, Raphaella. I’m not sure they’ve got the logistical capacity.”
“You mean, they’re not very fucking helpful at the best of times, and it wouldn’t be any skin off their noses if Sanjiv and Mary died just because they couldn’t get off their arses for the sake of a fellow fucking human being.”
“You’re under a lot of stress, Raphaella. Remember, you’re not in charge. Mars is in charge,” cautioned Zeke, who was a professional astronaut.
“Don’t make me come up there and kick you in your holy underwear.”
“How do you know about that?”
“You think I’m uneducated or something? Nah, I saw it in The Book of Mormon. Remember that show?”
“I’m not a Mormon, actually,” Zeke said. “I’m a Baptist. Equal opportunity hiring. Sit tight, I’m putting you through to Francis.”
She kicked her legs, watching her big feet swim through the thin air.
“Francis? Yeah, it’s Raphaella.”
The Chinese radio operator’s name wasn’t really Francis Chang. Or maybe it was. Who knew? He was the one who’d Facebooked her before their launch, inspired, he had explained, by the coincidence of their shared surname. His prank had amused the hell out of the whole Chinese expedition, allegedly. Even now, sitting in a Martian crater, he had a puckish sense of humor.
“It’s better for you if they are dead. That solves your water problem, no?”
“We don’t have a water problem.”
“You will soon. We ran the numbers while you are talking to Zeke. You can’t dig enough with only one rover. Plus there are abrasion issues. That big dust storm degraded the environmental tolerances of your EVA suits as well as the rover. We have the same problem.”
“I’ve got it under control.”
“If the other guy—Deet?—helps you, maybe you can dig more. But he doesn’t help, does he?”
Raphaella regretted having vented her gripes about Deet to this unseen, unknown Chinese man. She changed the subject. “So what you’re saying is you’re not going to send anyone to look for Sanjiv and Mary.”
“Oh, I’ll tell General Zhou what has happened. But I am not in charge.”
“Then tell him that there’s a rover and two EVA suits there for the taking, see if that changes his mind.”
“Raphaella…”
“I want those suits. Do you hear me?”
She had spoken over him. He was talking. “…the HGAS. If you can’t recover it, maybe you can use our bandwidth.”
“For what?”
Maybe she imagined the reluctance in his voice. “To send back more films.”
She ferociously clicked the talk button. “I want the truth. Are we being set up here? Is this a fucking snuff film? Do they want to watch us die, one by one, to boost the ratings?”
“Don’t be stupid. It is too expensive to kill people on Mars. They can send them to the Netherlands for much cheaper. It’s financial, Raphaella. If they don’t get films, they don’t get money. Then maybe they cannot send the second ship.”
“Oh.”
“Mars First is on, what’s the expression, a razor string? Shoe string. It’s crazy. We are all surprised and admire. But honestly, Raphaella—” he was talking faster now, his English breaking up—“they got really crazy thinking. They choose polar plateau for landing site. They want you spending all winter there. Such typical Russians! Psychological risks is insane. We and Salt Lake II think not ethical to giving such advice. I don’t even suppose tell you—”
The radio squelched and went silent.
Raphaella took her headphones off. “He’s full of crap. Don’t fret, my babies,” she said to the plants under the LED lights. “You’ll have all the water you need, now Our Lady of the Kidney Stones is gone.”
She smiled, thinking that that would be a good line to use on camera. Then she remembered that Mary was probably dead. Then she remembered that they had lost the HGAS, anyway.
While she completed the rest of her maintenance tasks, she thought about Francis’s offer of bandwidth. If she took him up on it, she’d have to tell Deet that she had been in touch with the Chinese all along, and not said a word about it to Sanjiv or Mary, even when they were about to set off on their dangerous journey towards Gale Crater.
Sod Francis, she decided. And sod Mission Control.
The whole reality show business was not only stupid but dangerous. Sanjiv and Deet wouldn’t have escalated their feud to the point of no return if they had not, both consciously and unconsciously, been performing
for an audience.
“I’m sick of Deet pointing his camera at my tits all the time, anyway. Fucking perv,” she murmured.
A soft arpeggio rang through the cabin. An alert from the reactor that it was about to discharge excess power. “OK,” Raphaella said to it, comforted by the reminder of its presence. It was like having a mother in the next room, one who didn’t nag or criticize, but just kept you warm.
Six months passed. Mars continued its journey around the sun, moving further from Earth. Meanwhile, the planet’s axial tilt plunged the north polar plateau into night.
Back on Earth, the Russian philanthropist and his chief scientist bowed to public pressure and held a press conference. It was mobbed. Reporters, like everyone else, enjoy hearing bad news in person.
That the news would be bad no one doubted. The months-long silence from the crew of Mars First had already been construed as proof that disaster had befallen them. Still, a respectful hush greeted the chief scientist’s confession that all four “pioneers” were presumed dead.
Stumbling over his words, the wretched scientist went on to explain what was believed to have happened. After Sanjiv and Mary’s disappearance, arithmetical efficiency losses had doomed the remaining pair to a slow death from thirst and oxygen deprivation. Crucial factors included greater-than-expected abrasion to key equipment (he meant the EVA suits), a malfunction of the nitrogen trap due to software updates incompletely transmitted, and of course, the pioneers’ own exhaustion and physical malaise…
The audience grew restive.
“Isn’t it true that corners were cut?” demanded the New York Times. “Didn’t you send four people, literally plucked off the street, inexperienced, untrained, into a situation where they could not hope to survive?”
“They were not untrained,” the chief scientist said indignantly. “And as for experience—what does experience mean, on a world where no human being has ever set foot before? You try to find out what will work.”
“So they were guinea pigs!”
The chief scientist tried to walk his statement back, but the damage was done. By the end of the scheduled Q&A time, most of the journalists had left to file their stories.
Those remaining sat up when the philanthropist himself stepped to the microphone. He was a trim man in Savile Row suiting with the cracked hands of a mechanic. “If you want to know more than we have told you, you should ask our Chinese and American friends. They tell us that our brave pioneers are dead. We have no contact with them ourselves. All we know is what the Chinese and the Americans want us to know. We, ourselves, believe Raphaella and Deet are still alive. Yes, alive! I believe—” those working-man’s paws grasped at the air—“I believe in the strength of the human spirit! You Westerners are weak. You need your hands held, you think the soul is as easily wounded as the skin. You are wrong! The soul endures. I struggled for twenty-three years before I succeeded in business! I have no university degree, no qualifications! I’ve been in jail, I’ve been persecuted by all kinds of people, and now I am number seventeen on the Forbes rich list!”
He was led off the stage, arguing plaintively with his press secretary.
INT. HAB 1—NIGHT.
The couches are folded down into their bed configurations. Raphaella and Deet lie side by side, separated by a gulf that is almost entirely filled with the debris of emergency ration packs. A dim orange nightlight, intended to entrain circadian rhythms in the absence of natural light, glows on the ceiling. Both humans wear OXYGEN MASKS. They lift the masks away from their faces to speak.
RAPHAELLA:
The camera’s on.
DEET:
Yes, I want to start filming again, so someone someday will find out what happened to us.
RAPHAELLA:
Oh for fuck’s sake.
She turns her face towards the camera. She is shockingly gaunt. Most of her curly black hair has fallen out, leaving her skull visible through the remaining strands.
RAPHAELLA:
All right, for the record, we are about to abandon this settlement. It’s been ten days since the rover crapped out. We’ve been living on our reserves since then, and there’s only one way for that to end. I depressurized the Roquentin, abandoned the farm, but I can’t dig enough by hand out there. It’s a hundred and twenty-five below zero and my suit’s abraded to shit. So we’re leaving. I reckon we can carry the hab’s water extraction apparatus. Leave the hopper, take the oxygen converter and the business end of the nitrogen trap. We’ll haul the lot on one of these couches, like a sled. It’s completely doable. But if we don’t go now, we’ll be too weak to try.
DEET:
We can’t carry enough food. It’s nine thousand kilometres. We can’t walk that far.
RAPHAELLA:
We don’t have to walk nine thousand kilometres. Only about three hundred.
DEET:
What do your Chinese friends say?
RAPHAELLA:
They’ve built a computer model. It gives us an eighty percent chance of making it to the Vastitis Borealis plain. Once we get that far, they’ll come and pick us up. The thing is their rovers run on solar power only, so they can’t come north of the polar night terminus.
DEET:
We won’t even reach the plain if our other rover is not there, and the suits.
RAPHAELLA:
It has to be there. I saw them go over the edge. You’ve seen the recording, too.
DEET:
Perhaps that was just a dust-cloud caused by a normal descent.
RAPHAELLA:
Come on, Deet. They’re down there. The reason Phobos can’t see them is because they’re buried in dirt. We’ll find them with the metal detector. Get their suits, cannibalize ’em for parts. Ditto the rover. Maybe we can even get it working.
DEET:
Forget it. Just go without me. Leave me here. Go to your Chinese brother, what’s his name? Francis? I’m sure he wants to see you.
Raphaella sits up in a fluid low-grav motion. She leans across the gap between their couches and plants her left hand beside Deet’s head, gazing down at him.
RAPHAELLA:
Did I ever tell you what I did before I applied to Mars First?
Deet stares up at her expressionlessly. His skull is bald, his features sharp. He looks as fragile as a baby bird behind his oxygen mask. A month ago he fractured his left leg, tripping over the computer in the dark. It is still in a cast, which gives his body an odd lumpy shape inside the sleeping cocoon.
DEET:
You were a nurse.
RAPHAELLA:
I worked on the terminal care ward. I looked after dying people. I’m saying people but they were just vegetables with a pulse, really.
She sits on the edge of his bed. He jerks over to the bed’s far edge to give her room.
RAPHAELLA:
Their families never came to visit. Couldn’t blame ‘em. ‘That’s not Grandma, it’s just a burden, it eats and drinks and that’s all.’ So with those families in mind, what I did once or twice, well, a few times, I was doing them a favor really…I’d just very quietly put a pillow over their faces. It never took long.
Raphaella leans over Deet, supporting herself on her left arm. She draws back her right hand and strokes his fluffy fuzz of hair.
RAPHAELLA:
I was wrong, Deet. Life is worth living no matter how shit it is.
She flops back down on her own bed as if exhausted.
DEET (very softly):
You aren’t going to kill me?
RAPHAELLA:
Francis isn’t my brother. He’s just some Chinese bloke. You’re my real brother, and I won’t leave you here to die.
Deet sits up. Reaching over to Raphaella, he gently removes her oxygen mask and touches the keypad tattooed over her mouth and chin, pretending to dial a number.
DEET:
Raphaella, phone home.
RAPHAELLA:
Sod off.
DEET:
Sorry. I had to make that joke sometime.
—CUT—
Raphaella had not told Deet everything about the plan that the Chinese and the Mormons had jointly come up with. Specifically, she had not told him that they had instructed her to leave him behind.
They had reasoned that to save one of the Mars First survivors was better than to save neither. But Raphaella believed she and Deet could both make it.
She loaded the equipment onto the couches, which she had lashed together and fitted into a set of spare rover treads (lesson learned from Sanjiv and Mary’s futile attempt to tow Hab 2 away with them: inflatables popped easily). Pulling side by side, they set out into the polar night.
This was the first time Deet had set foot on Martian soil in thirteen months. He kept his faceplate pointed squarely at the pebble-littered, frost-patched circle of dust in the light of his headlamp. Three hundred yards from the settlement, he collapsed.
Raphaella had been expecting this. They’d had to remove his cast so that he could get his EVA suit on, and the leg was still weak. The rest of him wasn’t much stronger. She put him on the sled, on top of the water extractor’s dehoused guts, and started pulling again. The Martian gravity made the absurd tower of equipment towable by one woman. It was just a matter of avoiding the bigger boulders.
She chatted over the radio to Deet to distract herself from the monotony.
“What did you want to be when you were in school?”
“An astronaut. I wanted to be an astronaut since I can remember.”
That confession was almost too painful to hear. “Deet, I’m sorry if this is something you don’t want to talk about, but I have to ask. What’d you think went wrong?”
Long silence. At last the mannikin perched on the sled responded.
“I think it’s like soldiers. You never know until you’re under fire how you will react…” A weak burst of rage. “I was fine in the spaceship. Fine!”
“Well, we were in touch with Earth all the time.”