Personnel:
Me (Jenny)
Trixie
Nicole, who is not an engineer but is nonetheless a handy one as a result of Air Force training, stepped in in place of Stefan. (See below.) Which provoked Trixie to yell “Birds’ holiday!” Australian slang, I understand, for a trip involving only women. (Question: is the derivation for this rooted in the manner in which birds, according to the saying, flock together?)
Scratched:Stefan, because he is supposed to be our engineer, was asked to come help with the telescope, but did not want to come. Perhaps because he is uneasy around me and/or all people of color, and perhaps because he just didn’t want to go somewhere/do something.
Trixie’s gendered declaration meant that Josh was not allowed to come. For that matter, neither was Roger. But Josh, I had been thinking, would come.
Necessity of Report, Given That Destination Mars! Has Recommenced Filming for the Reality TV Show, Including Via Cameras and Microphones in the Rovers and Spacesuits:
Unclear.
Summary of Excursion:
Leg 1: Habitation Unit to Telescope
As I’ve mentioned in other reports, Mt. Nearby, despite its name, is not especially near to the habitation unit, especially given the way the rover travels over rough terrain—indirectly and slowly. And of course the mountain is also tall. Not by Martian standards (against that standard, it’s more correctly called a hill) but compared to the surrounding area. The trip to the top of it took 5 Martian hours, during which we discussed the excursion and other matters. Nicole, having very seriously hung her lucky Mardi Gras beads off the dashboard—I have learned that people in the Air Force tend to be superstitious—drove the entire way.
Trixie noted that it was good to have 2 medical doctors present in order to keep an eye on the pregnancy. While en route, she “stethoed” me regularly (her term), took blood pressure and temperature readings (all apparently normal), and asked me repeatedly about my physical comfort level. Nicole was mainly quiet, until late in the trip when she unexpectedly suggested we shift from medical questions to some car games. (I welcomed this, and Trixie, all happiness, repeated her reference to a birds’ holiday.)
License plates being in short supply on the planet, we did “first letter last letter,” where one person says a word in a category and another person says a word whose first letter is the last letter of the previous word. Despite the category—Mars—Trixie somewhat fixated on reproductive terms. E.g., part of the transcript recorded by the rover’s internal microphone, starting with Nicole:
“Banh.” (a crater on Mars named after a city in the African country of Burkina Faso)
“That ends with an H, correct? Hm. Hartwig.” (crater named after German astronomer Ernst Hartwig)
“Well, gestation. What? That’s happening on Mars, too. It’s not all craters, you know.”
“Okay. Huh. Nereidum Montes.” (Martian mountain range)
“Great. Syrtis Major Planum.” (a surface feature on the planet)
“Motherhood. What?”
Et cetera.
Eventually Trixie fell asleep. Josh believes that she’s working very hard at her life-of-the-party personality, that it’s in fact exhausting to be her. In any case, with her asleep, conversation slowed and, when in motion, restricted itself mainly to expedition goals and concerns. Though at one point we passed a particularly empty stretch of landscape and Nicole said, “Some kind of a world for a baby.” Face characteristically hard to read; I didn’t pursue further.
The last portion of the trip, when the slope became impossible for the rover, was done on foot. Was uncertain as to whether I found the climb more difficult than usual. Certainly our muscles had already atrophied in the low-gravity conditions of the planet. Trixie, back in the rover, in constant contact with me via radio all the while.
Telescope Maintenance:
Upon arrival at telescope (which has been, as far as one can tell from the readings back at the habitation unit, functioning within normal specifications, though turning up few findings of any significance), Nicole and I inspected and cleaned exterior of telescope housing and then opened the housing and connected tablet to test all important parameters and components. Dusted mirrors and, upon closing the housing again, checked all seals. Though knowing that dust always finds a way in, no matter what you do. Summary: all functioning well within normal, even ideal, specifications. No repairs, part replacements, or adjustments necessary.See attached chart for complete listing of components, tests, readings, and observations.
Nicole, afterward, said, “We drove all this way out here for an all-clear report, huh?” Has been irritable. Trixie responded, “Oh, you wet blanket. We’re bonding.” Bonding being in the nature, I gather, of a birds’ holiday.
Leg 2: Telescope to Drill Site
The drill site is not far from Mt. Nearby, in relative terms; we drove the 1.5 hours on the same day we inspected the telescope. “Samples won’t take a minute,” Trixie said. Bouncing in her seat. Talking about the depth of the sample area—“Feeling lucky”—she said, fingers crossed on both hands. “Mama needs a new pair of microorganisms.” Also “stethoed” me repeatedly. “Bummer it’s too soon to hear the baby’s heartbeat, eh?”
Note that I am not yet feeling significantly different from how I’ve always felt before. Breasts slightly tender, increased need to urinate (unpleasant device available in rover), some nausea. Considerable disbelief. Concerns. Questions, including one about whether I’m doing the right thing, bringing this baby to term, though both Trixie and Nicole believe it’s safer than the alternative. In any case, many questions.
What’s happening? What am I doing? What will happen?
Presumably normal thoughts for a woman who is pregnant. On Mars.
Nicole, during this leg of the trip, mostly silent.
Drill Site Sampling:
Am leaving this summary to Trixie, who will presumably be writing a report of her own. From all appearances, sample easily obtained. Trixie extremely careful with it. Cradled it, you could say.
Overnight:
Because of the length of the trip back, we elected to stay overnight at the drill site, sleeping in the rover. Awkward, cramped. Also, Trixie is a very loud snorer; it took some time for Nicole and me to fall asleep, which led eventually to conversation there in the dark, lots of stars visible through the window. Transcript, starting with me:
“It’s really something, isn’t it?”
“What, the snoring? I’m pretty sure I snore, too.”
“Yours is more like . . . like a cat purring.”
“Are you listening to me at night, now?”
(long pause, even for Mars, and then me again) “What’s going on with you?”
(long pause and then sigh from Nicole, audible over Trixie snoring) “I’m sorry.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. This whole situation just has me thinking.”
(long pause)
(Me feeling like Josh, who is much more likely to ask questions than I am) “About what?”
(long pause)
“I see you and Josh, getting ready to have a family. It’s nice. It’s a good thing. But I . . . I have a range of feelings about that.” (Quiet but still audible) “I had a real shitshow of a family back Earthside.”
(long pause while I try to think of what Josh would say in this situation, until I finally give up, and just say the only thing I can think of) “Of course. That’s hard.”
“You got that right.”
(End of transcript)
Eventually—it took a fairly long time—Nicole was purring from her seat in the rover. There was a lot of sound in there. I considered that it may be exhausting to be Nicole, too. Perhaps most people. Remembered my father coming home from work, or after dealing with some trouble from my sister, saying,
“Just so damn tired.” Moaning it, more precisely. I looked at both women in the rover and considered what both must be carrying around.
Then in the midst of the sounds of sleeping I thought about how birds—actual birds from the taxonomic class Aves—are supposed to fall asleep automatically when placed in a darkened atmosphere. And how the rover was in that sense like a birdcage with a blanket over it. (Mars is, as I have mentioned in numerous other reports, very dark at night.) Except that I was awake. Unbirdlike. Perhaps it was the light of the stars; I continued to stare out the window at them. Are some birds more light-sensitive than others? Some less able to sleep? Obviously there are owls, who are presumably on reverse settings. And of course not all birds flock together. All that said, as much as I stared at the stars, I was not precisely seeing them. Of course I’m not in the habit of studying astronomical objects with the naked eye, and simultaneously my education has demystified and deromanticized them. Still clearly the light reaches you.
I sat awake in the rover and thought about all the things that people want and don’t have. This is not an easy subject to contemplate. I know from personal experience: terrible things can happen when people want things that they don’t have. Which is something I try not to think about.
But sometimes that’s a challenge.
What will the baby need and not have?
That night, after my own exhaustion won out, I dreamed that someone was calling my name.
Comment on Report:
Uncharacteristically unfocused; will almost certainly need to be rewritten.
Leg 3: Drill Site Back to Habitation Unit
A lot of talking. A lot of silence.
The Patterns
We know you’re here. It’s not like you’re sneaking about, with all the giant things that weren’t here but are now here and that put you out and which you go into and which you come out of again all the time. You make noise. You’re extremely visible. You might say there’s a smell.
We think you would use the word smell.
It feels like the temperature is rising. Do you feel the temperature rising? You might not notice; you don’t seem to be big noticers. Anyway, it’s small, so far. Of course, that may be how it starts.
The impression we have is that you’re looking for things that you’re not finding. There’s been a whole lot of cutting into rocks and pushing down below the surface and moving things from one place to another. A lot of those things go back into the big objects with you. Like we say, noisy. And a whole lot of it. We thought you’d just do this stuff once or twice, but you keep doing it. So we think you’re not finding whatever it is. This is just an observation; in any case, probably we couldn’t help you even if you noticed us. We’re not big lookers-for-things.
That said, sometimes we’re right there with you, inside, watching you as you look at the pieces of rocks and the amounts of liquid and as you don’t find what you’re looking for. At least we think that’s what’s going on. To be honest, there’s a lot of guesswork involved. And we don’t stay with you inside that much because of all of the walking right through us. Well, actually, we’re always inside with you—how could we not be?—but there’s a question of how there we really are. Because it certainly varies.
For sure the air is moving differently now. It’s navigating around you. Do you feel that at all? That affects us, believe it or not, messing—trifling?—with the air currents. How north and south we are, from the air currents. And besides they don’t taste the same as before.
It’s almost as though we can’t tell what’s happening or what’s going to happen.
Here’s how it was before you got here. Before even the every-once-in-a-while objects that crashed onto the surface and roamed about making scoops of this and scoops of that, roaming right through us, which is always an awkward experience. Before objects circled around at the top of the air, also circling right through us, at the edge between where there’s something and where there’s basically nothing. Awkward no matter where it happens. And it affects how in and out we are. Anyway, before all that, there were the Patterns. Temperature and air and where liquid was and where solid was, and the way things turned and moved. Moons and sun. Magnetism. Arranged in comprehensive ways but also in subsystems of ways. We knew all of that very intimately. You could actually say that we were the Patterns—are the Patterns. You probably would say that, if you were good noticers. You’d say, “Oh—they’re the Patterns.”
But of course those things change. They always change, so that what we were before you got here isn’t the same as what we were a very long time before you got here. Naturally. It used to be a lot warmer, in fact. And that affects how big and small we are, among other things. So we’ve seen change, always. And change is part of the Patterns, so we consist of the changes, partly, or we have consisted of them. Well, it’s hard to explain, even to ourselves. We just sort of get it. But so change isn’t new or remarkable, and we’re never the same, but it turns out that there are different kinds of change. There’s a difference. Natural versus unnatural kinds, we were thinking? After all, your objects don’t seem natural. But then we realized that we don’t know what unnatural means, because it’s all made of the same stuff, really. Everything is. We’re not even sure how the word unnatural got into the conversation. But so we’re having trouble bolting down the difference between how things used to change and how they’re changing now.
We think you would say bolting. Possibly nailing?
Maybe there’s no difference at all. One of the most important things is that Patterns have many orders of magnitude, and that across time we discover new, larger orders of magnitude around the other ones that we already knew about. I think when we started out it was just mass and less mass, mass all here and mass in different places, but then there was light, which affected how massive and not-massive we were. It happens over and over again, if you take the long view. We might be thinking, right, we’ve got this all sorted out, and then it turns out there’s something else and it’s part of things and of us, too. It keeps things interesting, believe me. So we’re wondering if maybe you’re part of the next order of magnitude.
At the same time, some of us are wondering if you’re something else. The idea is that you might not be part of a larger Pattern, but that, with your new objects and your going this way in objects and that way without them and scooping and different things, that maybe you’re some kind of Unpattern, or that you do Unpatterning, or however you’d want to think about it. And the reason some of us are wondering that is because we haven’t ever before had a some of us. It’s always just been us. It’s a pretty big deal around here, having some of us this and others of us that. And it may be part of something and it may be unpart of everything.
We think you would use the word chaos.
And so there are different points of view. Some of us actually want to spend more time with you, be really there when we’re there, because for sure the whole deal is pretty interesting. (That word—interesting—is interesting. Because it could be good or bad, but it’s still interesting.) Those ones of us want to really be with you as you move through your big objects and go from one smaller object to another, and as you sort through the pieces of things. And maybe, given that we’re starting to understand what you’re thinking about or at least how you think—certainly we’ve picked up a lot of vocabulary just by listening—the interest is understandable.
What does the word preggers mean, by the way?
Those same some of us have suggested that communication is possible—not just listening but also speaking to you—and that there have been one or two semi-successful tries. This whole deal is new to us, so who’s to say? Anyway, those ones of us want to know more of what you’re thinking about. Because there could be a Pattern there.
Others of us, though, want you gone. You weren’t here before you were here, so the thinking is that you must have been in another
place. We know there are other places, although we aren’t there. And those others of us think everything would be better off if everything was where it originally was. But then still others object and say that, technically, nothing is where it originally was. And the first others say, You know what we mean.
This is how it’s gotten with us.
But how has it gotten with you? That’s what some of us want to know. Because when you move it doesn’t seem to have that much to do with magnetism or mass. Light and dark, maybe—some of us say, See? Patterns?—but that’s only the sunlight and not the position of the tiny lights way beyond in the place where there’s basically nothing. Mostly, despite our progress listening in, we really don’t know why you do what you do or even exactly what you do.
Maybe there will be another change, a change we can all handle, a change for the good, if you do find what you’re looking for. Is that a possibility, you finding what you’re looking for? Are you maybe getting any closer? Some of us say faces, and claim to see wrongness on those faces. Or rightness? Others say that that’s just part of a larger Pattern, and that soon the faces will change. Things looked for will be found, and Patterns will be Repatterned, and you will be you rather nicely and maybe not quite as loudly and that will be part of us and nothing more will be confusing. That’s where some of our hope is these days.
Although, honestly, that’s only some of it. Because then you go around some more and Unpattern this and that, and what are you even looking for? You’ve broken all those rocks, and taken pieces of things and you’re below the surface all over and farther and farther than ever. And we don’t know why. Are you even looking? We don’t understand. Even if you weren’t so loud and with the smell, it would still be on our minds. The things you do—they go on in us, basically, and they affect how right and wrong we are. It’s a lot. It’s possibly too much.
How to Mars Page 6
