Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

When we had conceived of our deadly purpose, we returned to our various Excelsior responsibilities in silence.

This all reminds me that I forgot to give you the really delightful news here on the Mars colony, or at least the news that is potentially delightful, and that is that we have our first pregnancy! Don’t you think that’s amazing! Apparently, if you count backward on your fingers, you will find that once Brandon was evacuated from the Pequod , Laurie and Arnie, during the period when Laurie was recovering from the unwarranted assault, must have found time to take comfort in each other’s loving arms.

It was mission protocol that the astronauts were to avoid having relations with one another, and for this reason NASA specifically refused to stock the mission with birth control pills, condoms, et cetera. This also sat well with the religiously minded congressional legislators who had signed off on the Mars mission annually, for about ten years, until NASA had amassed enough funds ($400 billion) to send us astronauts into flight. Some of these congressional lifers didn’t even believe that Mars existed. The fact that we were chaste, spiritually fit, and abstinent from vice made the financing more palatable.

Laurie told me, when we talked about it later, that they tried to practice the rhythm method for a few weeks. But after a point they realized there had been mistakes . Here were the questions I wanted to ask. I wanted to ask Laurie what she thought about the fact that Arnie was married, and that his wife was actually a NASA employee (his wife was in public relations), and he had the two kids, and she had the autistic son, the teenager, the one to whom she wanted to send photos of the Olympus Mons, and I wanted to ask if she thought twice before doing it, or if she just went ahead and did what she did, fell into his arms, and you know the two of them seemed so well-adjusted, so levelheaded, so able to adapt, but then they did what they did, and you never heard Arnie talk about his kids, and what were those kids thinking now, and when he posted things on the web (always routing the request through my office, at least in the early days of the Mars colony), they were always about geological stuff, and these posts had a lot of Latin names in them, and then maybe there would be one stray remark about the poetry of our new home, “Harvesting rock samples on the plain called Chryse Planitia, I stopped one morning to admire the graceful transit of the planet’s two moons,” and it didn’t say “and that night I had wild kinky sex with my pregnant colleague among the plants of the greenhouse,” but the scientific method in Arnie’s case was always a screen for whatever else was going on; he used the scientific method as if it were some kind of lead shield, as if it were an ideological lead shield, a religion, a holier-than-thou religion, and Laurie was no better; she sent notes back to her son, but they got more and more infrequent, and they spoke of the all-consuming nature of her job, and she never once mentioned interplanetary disinhibitory disorder . What kind of remorse did she have afterward, if any? Was she a person who felt remorse? And in her opinion, was remorse possible with interplanetary disinhibitory disorder? Was it all glorious and moist and proto-human for them? And what did she think about having a baby on the Red Planet? Was it a convenience that her obstetrician was also the father of the child? And was she worried about delivery? Did she believe we had sufficient anesthetic to make delivery pain free? And if what they had done they had done in an inhuman way, in a way that was careless about human things and that papered over this inhumanity with professionalism and the scientific method, can anyone really be surprised?

Laurie wanted to have the child naturally, she told me, before I even had a chance to ask her any of the questions I’ve just posed. The first child she’d had in the hospital, and it was a long, complicated labor, occiput posterior, with a C-section at the end, and she was a little angry about the hospital treatment she had received. In this case, despite the hurdles involved, she was thinking bathtub . It was better, you know, for the child to be expelled into water. Everyone felt great for Laurie, or they tried to, because it was good for Mars, and Steve drew a digital image of flowers, which he sent to her via what we referred to as the Martian Pony Express: radio messages that went back to Earth, to our NASA e-mail accounts, which we then accessed later with the usual delay. Not the best way to get in touch, the Martian equivalent of snail mail, but polite and effective in this case. Steve was happy for her; Abu was happy for her. José was happy for her. We could only hope, in the unlikely event that we were never going to get off the planet, that she was going to have a daughter, just to keep the genetic stock heterogenous. Wouldn’t want the early Martians to be noteworthy for insufficient genetic diversity.

Jim and I were in the habit of taking the occasional afternoon constitutional, and after we finished wheeling the ultralight out of the Excelsior , and setting it up at a suitable distance from the encampment, we made for the lip of some distant barren sands. It was here that the two of us attempted to solve some of the problems in our own little world, the world of the Excelsior . If the wind was not blowing terribly, we could just follow our footsteps back, because footsteps were the exception rather than the rule here, and anyway there was the American flag, which had been hoisted on that first day and was still flying, only slightly tattered from the velocity at which the winds blew in this desolate place. We used it as a homing beacon.

“Jim,” I said.

“Don’t,” said he.

With helmets on. Via short-range walkie-talkie.

“I have to.”

“You do not.”

“I have to.”

“I beg of you.”

“Please,” I said. And then the words were out of my mouth, muffled only slightly by our Martian space suits. “Do you never think of me?”

“I wish there were some days when I didn’t have to.”

“You know what I’m getting at.” I gestured to the east, where Phobos was beginning her transit. “What is this place, Jim, but the place of loneliness? What am I meant to feel here besides loneliness? There’s nothing here! Anything we make here, we make ourselves. There’s nothing that we haven’t made, or carried here, and there’s nothing special that we’re going to make for a generation. It’s a landscape of scarcity. Paucity. Maybe I’m here because I didn’t live up to my potential back on the home planet, Jim, I’ll admit it. Maybe that is something I can do for humankind. I can come to one of the many planets that God evidently didn’t finish decorating, and I can work here, carve something out of the splendid barrenness. But does that mean that I have to give up on love? Jim? What did the heavy heart of planetary exile teach me? What has it taught you? Does it teach us to give up wanting? Does it teach you that a man is not a man? Or does it teach you that you are what you long for, no matter what the essence of that longing is, and that the constraints the home planet imposes on longing are not written in nature? I felt something back there, in the void between the planets, and it was like the icy exterior of my failed marriage and my desperation back on Earth were melting off of me, and I felt suddenly alive, however clumsy and awkward the whole thing was. Do you really mean to make out like it never happened at all, Jim? Can you really do that? Would you leave a man shivering in the night, and not even once try to beat back the subspace emanations of loneliness?”

“Enough!” Jim shouted, and I could see the fog in his helmet from the discomfort of it all. He grabbed me by the shoulder, and there we stood, far from home, in a place where, if we died, and it was reasonable to suppose we might, it could be decades before they found our skeletons. At last, Jim continued: “You don’t know what goes on in here, Jed! You don’t know what kinds of anguish I feel here. A man’s woe is his own even when he puts it into inadequate words. What happened up there, that night, well, it changed me. But not in the best ways. I feel like I’m breaking apart, because of it all. I feel like I can’t look at myself in the mirror and be sure that I’ll recognize the face that looks back at me. Every day I get a message from my kids, my boys and my little girl, I feel some stirring of such confusion in myself that I… I don’t know if I can… withstand this, Jed, this interplanetary me. My older boys got into a fight at the ice hockey rink yesterday. They didn’t start it, but they had to finish it, and they administered some exemplary kind of knockout blow to the attacker, and each of them was bloodied by the combat. I’m proud as hell of them. But would they be proud of what their father has done? Their father the first gay captain in space? Is what he’s done good for them, good for the home planet? They were the ones who suggested I come here. I did it to try to put the loss of their mother to rest. Did I do the right thing? Is this the right place for the likes of me? NASA can’t get ahold of us more than one day out of seven now, and we have begun forging a colony of our own. Without them. A good thing? Or a bad thing? Faced with these uncertainties, faced with the frailty of the Mars colony, Jed, what do I do about the carnal fire I feel when I think about you? You, Jed Richards. Should I just chase you around in the capsule, grab-assing, when every one of us is in danger of getting scurvy starting sometime next month when the vitamin C capsules run out? Will I still look attractive to you when my teeth start dropping out?