How to Mars

by David Ebenbach

  This means that you will have to make some difficult choices. You can do this—you’ve already made the almost incomprehensibly difficult decision to go, to lift your foot off this planet and head to an unknown world and never come back. That’s a huge one, which you nailed. Unless, that is, you’re reading this section as a potential applicant and haven’t yet decided whether or not you’re really going to apply, in which case we hope this section will help to clarify some things and help you to choose. But the main idea is that the opportunities—untold knowledge, adventure, a new frontier, fresh hope for a species that really ekes out a living on hope, etc.—the idea is that the opportunities outweigh the costs. After all, just think: Mars. You’ll be living on freaking Mars. (See Section 2 for more thoughts on why it’s an unbelievably amazing idea, and why we wish we were going.) Of course, only you can decide that big main decision, and (after that) only you can decide what you will and won’t bring with you, within the stated limitations.

  Some guidelines:

  In terms of exercise equipment, small items may fit but most things won’t, and weight is an issue here; two barbells worth the effort of lifting will take you right over your limit. Remember that the Communal Resource Stockpile will contain some helpful resources.

  Paper and paper goods are surprisingly heavy. If you decide to bring files and journals, old newspapers and birthday cards, you will rapidly reach your weight limit. And you are welcome to use our scanners here to create digital images of important materials for the tablets.

  No fireworks or other incendiary devices, for obvious reasons.

  You cannot bring very long objects, like non-compact umbrellas. You will not, in any case, need umbrellas.

  You cannot bring your own well-worn comforter, and, if you bring your own pillow, it will probably be the only thing that will fit in your bag. We will, of course, provide bedding especially designed to work with the bunks, both practically and aesthetically. And we ask you to remember that it is never appropriate to associate any particular set of bedding with important emotional states, such as safety and home.

  You cannot bring your favorite chair, with the body dents already in place.

  No full-length curtains that your mother crocheted.

  No large wall hangings (e.g., oil paintings). No medium-sized wall hangings.

  No bookshelves, regardless of whether you made them yourself. And bear in mind that the library of Mars is obviously going to be digital.

  You are in a room of your home right now, staring at something substantial that you suddenly realize you own and care about but that won’t fit in the tote bag. You cannot bring it.

  Have you ever moved before? Even from one apartment to another, in the same building? Then you know it already: some things can’t be moved.

  Also, if you’ve ever moved, you know that you’re going to be glad to leave some things behind—the lousy shower in the old apartment, say, with the terrible water pressure, or the neighbor who practices some kind of brass instrument late into the night, or the excessive friendliness of the neighborhood in general when you’re just out trying to take a walk. None of that can—or should—come with you.

  In any case, you can certainly bring a teddy bear, though you cannot bring your teddy bear collection, unless it is a very small and unsuccessful collection.

  You cannot bring rugs. Something the size of a doormat may be theoretically possible. That said, note that the Communal Resource Stockpile already contains novelty doormats which can be placed just outside the colony airlock entrances for a bit of light humor:Come In: What’s Mars is Yours

  Don’t Spread the Red (a foot-wiping request)

  Beware of Martian Dog

  Oh—certainly there will be no actual pets, aside from the two goldfish, male and female, that will be included as part of the Communal Resource Stockpile. We will eventually be sending some lab animals for research purposes, probably, but of course you must not become attached to those specimens as pets. (They are also not intended to be used as food.)

  You can bring small toys, if you have toys that you still use as a grownup, like bath toys—but there will be no baths. Mars will be shower-only.

  One way to think about all this is that you can’t, in other words, disassemble your home here—not-quite-cheerful yellow walls and race-car beds and tasseled sham pillows, maybe, and leaky pipes and stationary exercise bikes and that giant signed poster of Leonard Nimoy and slipper chairs and inconsistent central heating and stacks of old extreme sports magazines you never read and hardwood floors and that calcification you could never get out of the toilet and whatever figurines you might have amassed in surprising numbers and Barcaloungers and old lamps and breakfast nooks and wallpaper and the fusty basement that kind of scared you a little anyway, not to mention the garden you maybe tended out back—you can’t just break all that down here and reassemble it there.

  Nor will you be bringing the neighborhood you grew up in, or the real innocence you had then, the large experience you have whenever you stand at the edge of a large body of water, not that or the rain running behind your ears when you’re caught in a storm or the sensation of waking up in sunlight—and of course those things are already in some sense gone anyway.

  Certainly you cannot pack the future that you once had and are now setting aside in order to pursue this other one.

  You cannot bring additional people.

  You cannot bring any additional people.

  We have selected the people who are coming, and there are no other people coming. None of the many that you dislike, luckily, but also none of the ones that you like. None of the ones that you love. Please see Section 3 or perhaps one of our counselors if you struggle to comprehend what this means.

  You will not, in fact, be bringing all of your own person. You will not be carrying a gallbladder, an appendix, wisdom teeth. Not anything of the body that is both disposable and dangerous; you will leave all such parts here on Earth. Some of you may request elective, preventative mastectomies, and you will be readily obliged. Tonsillectomy may also be a wise move in some cases. You can have removed whatever might trouble you, can consign it to a jar and walk away. But a note on reproductive systems: although there will certainly be vasectomies and tying of Fallopian tubes, all the associated internal organs will remain in place unless you request otherwise. You won’t be using those organs—as mentioned in Section 4, you will not be having sex on Mars—but you’ll know that they’re there, and that may bring you comfort during the dark hours that may be very similar to, but not the same as, Earth ones.

  You cannot bring the view out of your living room window. You can bring a photo, of course, but you cannot really hope to capture the way the view changes as you move closer to the window or step to one side to lean on one of the jambs, along with the shift of the trees in the air, unsettling and resettling, and the great variety of cars that come down your street and cannot hold on to the way that combines with the sound of your difficult neighbor or the smell—perhaps it’s late fall and the city hasn’t picked up the piles of leaves and so they have begun to decompose—all of this providing somehow a multi-sensory but nonetheless singular experience which says to you, This is mine. This is what has come to me.

  It’s worth noting that you will not be bringing any windows, in fact, that open and close.

  We might add that there will be no need for window fans.

  The sunlight on Mars will not be the sunlight that you know from Earth. You will have sun, of course, but it will be more remote. This is speculation, but it may feel like God has turned God’s face just a few degrees away from you, and this will require some adjustment. Maybe you will feel loss. Maybe you will feel finally free.

  Also consider your many routines. For example, your morning r
outine: In the morning you wake up and let’s say you get right up to walk into your living room to look at that view, which as we’ve said you can’t bring with you, not the ugly bits or the nice ones, and then you get dressed without thinking much about getting dressed—you showered the night before, to help you fall asleep—and you eat breakfast standing up at that same window, even though you do have a table with chairs, but probably the table is scattered with mail, a lot of it completely junk. And then out the door briskly to the bus or subway or car. Let’s say bus. And on the bus, though these are not people you know, and though largely you are thinking about the concerns of your work, concerns that probably won’t come with you, you register each person as she or he walks down the aisle past you or stands nearby, once all the seats are taken. Tall person, you think, or round person, or person who smiles when people are not looking, or person dressed very warmly for this time of year, or marginally scary person, or person who sort of looks like someone else you know. You get off the bus and walk to the building that is the building where you work. The weather is nice or it’s not nice. (You cannot bring the weather.) You walk past benches of one kind or another, including the one that nobody sits on because the trashcan is right next to it and always overflowing, and in the summer it’s clouded with bees. (There will be no bees.) You get to your building and go inside. Inevitably you encounter someone once you’re inside, and she or he greets you by name. He or she asks an innocuous and unanswerable question about your well-being; nonetheless you try to answer it. There are answers available. If it’s a certain kind of person who you know a certain kind of way, there are sincere answers available. That person might even walk you to the room where there’s tea or coffee or in your case a very cold cup of water, which is all you need to get started. And you talk for a moment more—the lights are fluorescent but they’ve thoughtfully chosen the light covers and painted the walls and chosen the carpet to warm up the space somewhat, so it’s a place where you can pause and talk. And then at some point you both nod your heads and it’s time to do the work that you’re ready to do. And the point is that you can’t bring any of that with you.

  But what if it’s not like that at work? What if you go in and nobody seems to care that you’re there? What if, when you meet people here or there, they ignore you or they ask you to do things that you don’t want to do, or tease you about your shirt, or call you nicknames that you don’t like? Or, back before that, what if the crowdedness of the bus makes you itch all over? Or when you step out of your house in the first place—what if you step out into the world full of all its white-collar crime and wars and climate change and people that don’t make any sense to you and you think, even though it’s the only world any of us have ever lived on, you think, What the hell am I even doing here? You can’t bring it, that baffling world that you may currently live in right this very second. You get to leave it.

  You can, of course, bring each and every emotion. (For things you will be unable to leave behind—grief, personality issues, etc.—see Section 10.) You can bring your busy mind, that loses and gains.

  But you cannot bring a comprehension of what’s to come. You may not understand it when you’re there. What do you understand right now, standing perhaps in your garden with a view of everything that you have turned into something that surrounds you? Or standing with a view of yourself?

  You cannot bring your bathroom mirror. Does that matter? We will provide reflective surfaces.

  You can bring yourself.

  You can’t bring yourself.

  Can you bring yourself?

  Old printed photographs are allowed, up to the stated limit.

  Team Orderly Mars

  Stefan didn’t break Roger’s fingers because he was cross with Roger; Stefan broke Roger’s fingers because Mars was a lawless planet. Well, and also he was cross. But the primary bit was the lawlessness.

  This fact—the fact that there was no legal structure, no system of rules or enforcement—had never occurred to him at any point during the months spent on that tight little rocket that he helped to pilot and which, in its all-encompassing technological sophistication and detail, seemed like an extension of Earth and its rules, but the fact struck him the minute he stepped out of the rocket. He realized it as he put his feet down onto the orange sand in his big, puffy suit, surrounded by other big, puffy suits, and under the sun that was not precisely the same sun they had grown up with, the open lifeless landscape spreading off toward all the horizons: he stood there and thought, Nobody is in charge of this.

  Because there was nobody here. There was nothing here. There was nothing anywhere near here. To the left, orange sand. To the right, orange sand. Above, brown sky. Below, orange sand. Every time you made a footprint, it would be the first footprint. Stefan, just off the rocket, demonstrated this to himself with his own foot. There it was—the tread of a space boot—a first. He could have done it anywhere. Everything was new and ungoverned.

  He thought, I can do whatever the fuck I want.

  Stefan was from Denmark, and Denmark was of course a proper country of laws. This is a country of laws, his father used to say, his finger up in the air. As a matter of fact, they were number one at it; in worldwide “rule of law” surveys conducted by organizations that conducted such surveys, Denmark was tops. A lawful paradise. Stefan had been proud when he read that in the news—he’d actually straightened up at the breakfast table and murmured Hail King and Fatherland under his breath.

  But then, through many intermediate steps and considerable time and effort, he worked his way from that table to this place. And, he was realizing, this place was a patch of untracked sand that was six months by rocket from the nearest police station. Think about that! Six months from the nearest officer of the law. It changed things. The Destination Mars! cameras were rolling for the reality show, of course, but the people running those cameras were on another planet.

  He turned to the person who happened to be standing next to him—a soft-spoken, pale, balding, Canadian man named Roger in a big, puffy suit of his own—and thought, I could push you over onto the ground. He didn’t even really want to push Roger over, exactly. But he could do.

  “I know,” Roger said, even though he didn’t know, in response to Stefan’s silent stare, which in any case he couldn’t see past the mirrored front visor. “It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?”

  Stefan didn’t do anything then, of course. It was only a thought. A ridiculous one. And there were other thoughts, too, including all the expected things like, OH MY GOD THIS IS MARS and I hope the living quarters are all set up and I hope there’s breathable air in there and so on, and there was some joyous low-gravity bouncing about with the five other puffy people, kicking up clouds of dust and sand that were being kicked up by people for the first time ever. But that other thought had definitely found a home in him.

  Thankfully, the living quarters were all ready, thanks to the robots that had landed ahead of them and set up their whole facility, a cluster of interconnected domes where they would live and work and everything else, and there was indeed breathable air and edible food and there was electricity and running water and even some comfortable furniture to relax on—chaises longues and so on—and the atmosphere was giddy. Partly because the oxygen mix needed a bit of refining, but mainly because of Mars. And actually there wasn’t much relaxation at first, with so much wanting to be done. Jenny started setting up the telescope, Nicole did extensive physicals on everyone, Roger set up procedures to take rock and soil samples and started planting the greenhouse, Trixie pitched in with physicals and the greenhouse, Josh transferred the rocket Experience Logs into the mainframe and arranged his little therapeutic office, and Stefan tooled all the equipment. Each of them turned to his or her tasks with Seven-Dwarfs-level enthusiasm. It must have looked great for the cameras.

  Labor, however, was not, in this instance, order.
Nobody was doing work because of a requirement; they were all doing it out of excitement. Some organization did emerge along the way—they largely ate meals at the same time, because it was nicer like that, and people generally said please and thank you, and several of them attended Jenny’s open-invitation yoga sessions—but it was the sort of organization that you could opt in to, or opt out of. What they had on Mars were options.