Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

“How exactly are you going to take it from there? Do you want to fill me in on that?”

On the south side of the Martian equator, I imagined I could feel autumn threatening to stretch out its fingers, merciless, retributive. It was not as bad as it might have been on the South Pole, let’s say, nor was the planet tipped so badly on its axis that it was going to be a bad year as far as winter went. Still, let’s remember how cold it gets on Mars. It gets really, really cold on Mars. It can plunge toward −140 degrees Fahrenheit without much difficulty. As we have seen, it is easy to die of the cold here. Whereas on Earth, autumn can be an ennobling season, one in which you thrill to joyride out into the countryside in your sweaters and boots and perhaps with a jaunty cap, the autumn on Mars foretells a winter inimical to life of any kind. And this was a winter we were meant to survive with Mars at its aphelion — closer to 70 million miles, now, from the home planet.

It had been a week since I’d contacted NASA, and nothing had come of my wanton interference. Not so far. Jim must have been stalking Brandon and Steve slowly, because I had heard nothing of them, these disputants. But then why ought I have? I’d been sleeping in the power station, with the door of the main console bolted shut and with a couple of drums of coolant propped in front. What I was doing was exhausting my supply of pain relief. And drinking mead. Now and again I would look down at my hand and could feel its phantom extremity. I would feel the tingling of what Brandon had removed from me. My finger of death. I couldn’t grab much with the hand anymore, and the stump was ugly, not to mention the two fingers so crudely reattached. Still, I was able to depress the plunger on a syringe and to insure that oxygen flowed into the greenhouse, not too far distant.

Meanwhile, it was on the seventh of April, if I recollect the Earth calendar properly, that Arnie hailed me on my walkie-talkie and said that I needed to come quick. You guessed it, kids. Laurie had gone into labor. In fact, at the time of the call, she’d been in early labor for many hours. I counted back on my remaining fingers, and my initial diagnosis, though I am no obstetrician, was that it was not good that Laurie had gone into labor this promptly. This was no requisite nine-month term, not even close. Even if they’d been messing around on the Pequod only weeks into the flight out. Probably their romance dated back prior to launch. But there was no one else to be the under-assistant of gynecology that day. The rest of the Martian population was out conducting predator-and-prey games in the empty highlands. It was left to me to assist.

I hadn’t been to the greenhouse in a while. I hadn’t paid much attention. Fate had thrown together the participants of the Mars mission. The disparate responsibilities of the Mars mission no longer required social niceties. I hadn’t even seen Arnie since Steve had clocked Abu. I’d sent a couple of messages over there, true, in which I notified them that Abu had gone on to his heavenly reward, but I said no more than this. Arnie himself had suggested euthanizing the patient, after all. We celebrated a virtual memorial service for the folks back home, and that was the extent of it. I understand the story got little play in the news outlets.

Arnie and Laurie had floated blissfully above the infighting and the slaughter around them. They were a prelapsarian dyad with their green thumbs and their blissful attention to the homely tasks. When, at last, I went through their air lock, I was amazed by what I saw. Had they been striding around with fig leaves on it couldn’t have surprised me more. Arnie called to me from where he was, over by a small pool of water that he had somehow managed to fill up by fusing some of the liquid hydrogen fuel from the Pequod with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere. To get to the lake , as I later learned it was called, I had to go through a couple of other discrete ecosystems, namely a little forest of yew saplings, which Arnie had brought from Earth and much propagated since. They had some kind of anticarcinogenic property, these yew trees, or so it was thought, before chemotherapeutic compounds were synthesized. Tumors were still a concern on Mars, naturally, what with the cosmic rays and the thin atmosphere.

Beyond the yew saplings, an exothermic species, and a variety of ferns and fungi, there was a desert biome — pretty easy to simulate here — in which Arnie was experimenting with various kinds of cacti, especially edible ones, like prickly pear. And then there was a transitional ecosystem, temperate, with some edible shrubs, sweet fern, mulberry, and gooseberry. I didn’t even have time to get over to the vegetable garden, where the extra-strength grow lamps were all on timers performing their appointed tasks.

“Jed? Jed?”

The expectant couple were to be found by the lake . Laurie crouched on one of the space blankets that had accompanied us on our flight over, NASA logo prominently featured beneath her exposed undercarriage. She was pale, sweaty, breathless, and her generous brown locks, which she had let grow on Mars, were matted and plastered to her face. I could see that Arnie was already positioned at the relevant biological exit , where the little Martian boy or girl was already trying to get its head out through the available space, beneath the pelvis. Arnie was muttering about how symbolically rich it was to catch the baby. Arnie’s hands were covered in blood, and he pointed out to me that he’d had to cut a little bit to make the way easier, even though the baby was several months premature, and thus would be undersized.

“Premature?” I said. “You two must have been busy with the, uh, the conception way back in—”

Arnie fixed me with a disgusted stare and said, “I don’t have time for your games. If you’re up to it, get to work. What I need is for you to hold her hand like the decent guy you are, okay? Encourage her? And await instructions. I’ll need your help with the umbilical cord and the placenta.”

I was humbled, because I hadn’t intended to be the wretch I had become on Mars. I got down on the soil and dust that formed the floor of the greenhouse. I became an eager toiler in the delivery room.

“Laurie,” I said, delicately, “how you doing?”

Between hurried breaths, she said, “Worse than the first day of zero gravity training.”

“It’s going to be over soon,” I said. “Look at it that way. And you won’t have to smile for the cameras after.”

Arnie was nervously mumbling orders, as if he had a phalanx of trained residents behind him, awaiting his instruction, all of the mumbling orbiting around this question: Why had labor begun so early? It would take a while, it would take several more births, before it would be possible to say whether environmental factors played some kind of role in how children were born on Mars. We just don’t know yet , he was saying nervously. It could, of course , he muttered to himself, just be this particular fetus . “Come on, honey, another push, if you can manage, and the head will be—”

I held Laurie’s hand. She wept. And cried out. “The second’s supposed to be easier!”

I said, “It’s a moment in history, Laurie. A moment in history. Think of what you’re doing for everyone. People back home. This is a great and selfless act. This is something that was going to happen, that had to happen, and you’re the person who’s doing it. You’re bringing into being the first Martian of higher intelligence. The first mammalian Martian. Did you think this was going to happen back when you were a kid? Growing up in… Where did you grow up, again? I don’t think you had any idea.” And I just kept blathering, though it was hard to feel as upbeat as required. I could see that Arnie, despite his worry, was also excited, in the way an expectant father might be, even when that father is on a deserted planet with a dwindling supply of food, fuel, and allies. It’s just hard not to think of a baby as some kind of optimistic statement. I don’t know if NASA felt that way about it, but still. The baby’s head, in due course, emerged from the squatting, contracting Laurie. Then it was just about getting the shoulders through.