Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

But I had even more to consider when I got back to the Excelsior after the funeral, when I was wide awake with opiate insomnia, watching Jim Rose sleep. Kids, it was about time that someone sat down and began to describe the systematic decompensation of the emotional lives of everyone on Mars. It was time that someone made an attempt to study this decompensation , in an effort to describe it for the historical literature, and perhaps, in this way, to shed light on what we could next expect from Brandon. And from ourselves.

It seemed to me that there were only two possibilities. The first possibility was that the long-term separation from Earth did in fact engender something along the lines of interplanetary disinhibitory disorder , in an aggravated or acute form, such that people just couldn’t seem to keep their emotions in check. Do you need concrete examples? First, there was my relentless and humiliating neediness around Jim Rose. Evidently my homosexual romantic instincts were just not as graceful as my heterosexual instincts. I didn’t know how to stop wanting his attention; I didn’t know how to stop feeling that even his really peculiar habits, like the strange grunting thing he did while reading, were somehow endearing or even handsome. I didn’t know how to stop feeling flushed and warm inside when he was nearby. And I didn’t know how to stop pushing him on this, even though there had been moments recently when I actually worried that he was perhaps capable of battery.

This was the first example. A mostly normal heterosexual man becomes a wanton and pandering lothario of gay love. Then there was Debbie Quartz, of whom enough has been said. And Steve Watanabe, whose free fall into muteness already seemed to me to foretell dread things ahead. Jim Rose, who had started the mission as an upbeat high school quarterback of a guy and who now had more in common with Moses or Saint Jerome. And then there was the weird saccharine domesticity of Laurie and Arnie, though both were parents back home, and in Arnie’s case, happily married (or so it was said). Now, if they’d had a chance, they would have found a Martian golden retriever with which to adorn their playhouse. Of Abu, we had no example of eccentricity yet, except sculpture, but perhaps time would tell. He was just a very reliable person. And Brandon had evidently become quite insane.

Interplanetary disinhibitory disorder , that was one possibility of what we were seeing. The other possibility, and I admit that completely high on pain medication as I was, it was possible this was more a figment of my rather delusional mind, was that Brandon had already been infected with M. thanatobacillus . What I intended to research online, while I had the strength and was awake enough, was whether there was any kind of comparable bacterial infection that I could find from the medical literature on Earth that would give me an idea of what we were going to experience in the course of infection. Ordinarily, on Earth, with your new bacterial infections, when they were first making their way through the general population, there was a tendency for the infections to be fatal, and spectacularly so. Think of necrotizing fasciitis . Or hantavirus, which the overdevelopment of the desert cities had brought into the megalopolis. These bugs made you bleed everywhere and die within hours, begging for mercy.

M. thanatobacillus , on the other hand, may have had a preliminary effect that was only apparent in the character of the afflicted individual. Like rabies. I remember hiking in the Smoky Mountains with my daughter not too many years ago, when, at the summit of the mountain, we saw the most adorable skunk wandering around. Not the least bit afraid of us! Willing to walk right up to us! My daughter just adored skunks, and it was she who saw it first. She was getting ready to feed the rodent when I let out one of those parental howls that is intended to require immediate attention. No doubt the skunk was hydrophobic. It is possible that M. thanatobacillus has just this kind of a trajectory, wherein there are first character effects, and then only later do the somatic aspects of the infection begin to appear, the part of the disease where you disassemble . There was a sort of a hybrid of Marburg and dengue fever that the United States stockpiled during the Central Asian police actions a decade or so ago, and which were used in a very hushed-up way against rebel groups in the Caucasus region. I may have known more about this than I can say right now, and it’s possible that this hemorrhagic hybrid, which has a long acronym of a name that I can’t put my finger on right now, is a good model for the initial infection cycle of M. thanatobacillus . We found hardened warlords from the rebel groups wandering in the mountains, carrying daisies and singing to themselves. It was not difficult to neutralize these combatants, and that was before the onset of somatic symptoms.

Now that I was thinking about it, there may have been a third explanatory possibility, besides the two I’ve mentioned; maybe it was not the case that Brandon had interplanetary disinhibitory disorder; maybe it was not the case that he suffered the effects of his exposure to M. thanatobacillus , assuming José was right and such a bacterium even existed farther down in the Martian geological strata.

Maybe José got killed so that he’d keep his mouth shut.

March 12, 2026

To: The entire Martian Community

From: Jim Rose

Re: A Survey of Martian Economics

Be it known, fellow Martians, that the time has come for choosing! For every new civilization, no matter how fragile, no matter how young, how untimely birthed from the womb of the mother planet, there comes the moment in which this newly birthed society must determine for itself the specifics of its ideology. Fellow Martians, it is nearly six months now since first we set out on our long journey. How well we know the reasons and motives that first launched us into the milky oblivion of the innumerable stars! We know these reasons and motives because they were so often bandied about in the press and on television and across the web of our birth culture. We know the ideals to which the birth culture aspired, and we know the darker ways in which its needs oppress us! Fellow Martians, we know the mother planet is an angry and capricious mistress! We know that even at this distance she would command our every step, know every sentence that we utter, circumscribe every afternoon of the Martian year we are intended to spend here! And for what? For profit, fellow Martians, all for profit!

When they see Mars, as they do through the cameras that we have installed for them, or through the reports that we write down for them, or from the microphones that are even affixed to the jumpsuits we are wearing at this very moment, they do so through terms and according to multinational ideologies that were constructed and designed for that world. They preach freedom while requiring servitude, fellow Martians! They preach sacrifice and selflessness while underwriting the mission with geological riches and the avarice such a thing entails. They preach tolerance while practicing war, and then they command our allegiance!

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!