How to Mars

by David Ebenbach

  Maybe if Julia and I both get picked, it’ll be like—I don’t know. I don’t know what it could be like.

  “WHOA,” Bruce says suddenly, jumping to his feet. “What was that?”

  “What?” Elena says, and this is the first non-Bulgarian word we’ve heard out of her in a long time.

  “Something brushed my leg,” Bruce says.

  Several of us are pooh-poohing this when Yiran yelps and jumps to her feet, too. “There is something there,” she says.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a shadow zip through the water, and I stand slowly. Looking around, I can see several shadows, each maybe the size of my hand, zipping around. “Fish,” I say.

  There is general incredulity at this.

  “Fish?” someone says.

  The PA comes back on again. We, as usual, don’t know who’s speaking. We’ve met some people in charge, but the PA voices are always different from those people-in-charge’s voices. This time, it says, “The fish are not important.”

  “I think fish are inherently important,” Molly says upward, “in a workroom.”

  This strikes me as pretty reasonable. “Does anyone know what kind of fish they are?” I say. As far as I can tell, from the moments when the shadows slow down, they’re bristly, ugly things, though not very big. Everyone in the room is standing now. They all shrug, collectively.

  The PA makes a sound like a sigh and then speaks: “They are two-horned sculpin. The fish are safe, as long as you don’t touch their spines.”

  We all exchange glances.

  “The fish are not important.”

  I look up at the cameras. “Are there going to be more kinds of fish?”

  The PA voice says, “There will not be any important fish.”

  I stand there thinking. And for some reason I think about Lil’s garden, which I guess is not surprising, because actually I think about it a lot.

  When she was a child, Lil moved over and over again. Philadelphia, Maine, the suburbs around Baltimore, Wisconsin, Florida, New Jersey. Once they even lived in Mexico for six months. It was job stuff that moved them around—sometimes her mother, sometimes her father. And according to Lil all the places were nice. There would be an interesting house or apartment. Kids at school who needed new friends. But still it was always upsetting to move, and even with the same family and same furniture it was hard for her to see the new place as home. And so her mother would make a flower garden each time, or try to. Even though this was Lil’s childhood, not mine, I met her mother, and I can picture her kneeling there, getting the knees of her jeans dirty. She probably had special dirty-kneed jeans for that. Lil told me that when the flowers came up, they’d go out and admire them, and something would shift, and they would arrive the rest of the way.

  That was a story I almost told on my Destination Mars! application video—I want to make a garden on Mars!—but then I didn’t. I didn’t know what I wanted to do on Mars. And in any case I wanted to keep the story for me.

  Lil grew up to be a gardener herself. She even made a tiny garden in the tiny lawn in front of the house we shared together—flowers of all colors whose names I could never keep straight. The plot has gone wild since her death. It’s like the opposite of what happened in Lil’s story; when her mother made a garden, it allowed the family to arrive. As the one in front of our house became wilderness, I knew I had to leave. I knew I had already become homeless.

  I look across the room and catch Julia’s eye. She doesn’t look too optimistic at the moment. It occurs to me: it’s possible that she won’t make the final cut, won’t be sent to Mars. That’s definitely possible.

  And Julia is of course not Lil. Nobody is.

  I look at my desk, which is where things are right now.

  Nearby, Eddie asks the cameras, “Are there going to be any more surprises?”

  The PA voice offers the exact words that occur to me in response: “Yes and no,” it says.

  I think for just one more moment. It’s possible that I won’t make the cut, either. I’ve thought about that before, and I think about it now. And I get the same jolt that I always get: a jolt of anxiety, of loss in advance. Not because I think Mars could become home, but because of that distance, those millions of miles—away from the place that used to be our home, from the garden Lil once made, from the neatly trimmed plot where she is now—and at least that’s something. In fact, it’s the only thing.

  Even though the seat is now wet, I sit, and I reach for another small rectangle of paper. My hands are already in the shape of a tent.

  There Are Owls in the Moss

  (on Earth, before anyone departed for Mars)

  By the time his toothpaste had disappeared for the second time, and in the context of his showers having temperature variations unexperienced by the other candidates, and waking up with sand in his sleepsack all this week despite having always been in a spacesuit with built-in boots whenever he was outside—a spacesuit that they made all of them wear even though outside it was only Mungo National Park, Australia—a spacesuit that seemed to make him sweatier than it made anyone else and which he removed meticulously in the airlock every time, eliminating any chance of him having tracked any sand into the simulated colony units, and yet his sleepsack, and only his sleepsack, was suddenly all grit—given all that, Stefan was pretty sure that they were messing with him.

  For another example, that morning. Just that morning, he had gotten an email sent from the producers to his special account that was only meant to receive simulated Destination Mars! Mission Control emails, written as though Stefan and the others were actually on Mars. But this message read, in its entirety, We need you to sound more Danish. He had written back, somewhat incredulous, What do you mean? Accent? Expressions? Do you want me to mention King Frederik? but he had yet to get a response.

  He had the suspicion that none of the other candidates were getting odd emails.

  Stefan, formally educated as an engineer in England, had in fact very little in the way of a Danish accent, little enthusiasm for the Danish monarchy, and, when it came to idioms, he was more likely to say, for example, that someone cocked it up than that he trådte i spinat—which is to say, stepped in the spinach.

  Still—the man wanted to go to Mars. Quite a lot, in fact. And if that meant putting up with some bother, then Hil drot og fæderland.

  Stefan tried it out over lunch. Despite the fact that they were all, after three months, fairly tired of one another, and despite the fact that there wasn’t a common meal served but instead a scatter of individually heated up freeze-dried food portions, they still largely ate meals together. And so they were in the mess dome, along the long table, eating their various revivified items. Stefan had heated up some sausage and red cabbage, with a slice of bread and some mustard, which he now realized was all available because of its Danishness. In any case, he said, into the settled silence of people who have nothing left to say to one another, “Is it the horse’s birthday?”

  Four other pairs of eyes looked up from food at him. (Eric was, as ever, napping in the bunkroom, just biding his time until this was all over and he could go home.) Stefan was also aware of the several cameras and microphones hidden away throughout the room. That was his real audience: Television Land.

  “Is it what?” Orna said, down the table.

  “The horse’s birthday,” Stefan said, and he tried to swallow his r’s in the Danish way instead of in the British way. In England it was more a matter of ignoring the r’s altogether. “It’s a Danish expression,” he said. “You use it when you get a thick slice of rye bread.”

  Everybody looked at his bread, which was not thick.

  “I think that’s whole wheat,” Jackson said.

  Stefan glared at him. Or somewhat glared at him. Jackson was a little bit intimidating.

  “Are we going out for samples after lunch?
” Mary asked. And there was her Nigerian accent—Ah we going out fa sahmples ahfta lanch?—and, for the first time, Stefan wondered if it might be intentionally laid on a little thick. Had she gotten an email asking her to be more Nigerian? Or Orna—was Orna’s Israeli sound a put-on? Or was it only him? Did everyone else naturally sound more the way they ought to? He looked around the table a little feverishly. The lunchdome, he thought, narrating the scene, was a den of deceivers.

  “I think we’re supposed to,” Tiago said.

  “What?” Stefan snapped.

  Tiago’s eyes widened, big, wide, and brown. “Go out for rock samples.”

  Stefan nodded slowly, his eyes sharp on the Brazilian. “Okay,” Stefan said. “Okay.”

  Orna leaned in. When she leaned in you knew it; she had a lot of wild, dark hair. It was like a lion leaning in. She said, “Are you okay, Stefan?” She was also a medical doctor.

  He shook his head. “There’s no cow on the ice,” he said.

  Orna frowned at him speculatively.

  “There’s no problem,” he translated, his accent somewhere in between.

  A half hour later he was outside, in his spacesuit, surrounded by what might as well be Mars—everything vast and orange, or brown, depending on the light, and the landscape all crags and ridges with sand, of course, underfoot—and accompanied by Mary and Tiago this time. Three people in white spacesuits and helmets, looking exactly the same as one another and not quite human. You couldn’t see Mary’s increasingly ragged Cowrie-beaded braids or her Super Eagles T-shirt or Tiago’s black beard, his pug nose. You could only see the suits, the sun-gleam off the helmet’s visors.

  Rock samples. Given that this was well-explored Mungo, there was little doubt that they would just find more calcareous soil, but they had to be good sports and collect it anyway.

  Tiago asked, “Which direction, do you think?”—Tiago was too annoying to make the final cut, Stefan thought—and Stefan pointed toward an outcropping they hadn’t visited yet and said, “Over there,” but he buried his r’s again; he was going to play this thing out a while. Mary turned her opaque, helmeted face in his direction. Though she couldn’t make eye contact that way, Stefan felt his face blush. Which would in any case show up on the cameras positioned inside his own helmet.

  The fact: this was not proper science, not yet. This was really money. The reality show was funding the rocket. The reality show was funding the colony. The reality show would fund all the rockets and all the colonies. The reality show would fund everything, until everything was funded.

  It was also how they were going to decide who would go on: audience votes.

  Under a heavy sun—Stefan felt itchy with the first sweat—they walked off with big, slow steps, the way they supposed they’d have to on Mars. They communicated via radio. Or they would have, if they had anything to say. Mostly they walked and looked at the crags and ridges. They walked and looked while Stefan did what he’d been doing quite a bit lately: he silently narrated, in his head, his own experience in third person. They walked across what used to be the bottom of a gigantic lake and was now a semiarid desert biome, he thought. It was not the first time that he had narrated that exact line. Though sometimes he would add some poetry—With broad strides hard into the wind, they crossed the emptied bowl that had once been a vast and teeming lake, etc.—and other times he added more science—claypan, magnesite, Pleistocene—or, on some days, he might just say, He was really starting to loathe Australia. Sometimes Stefan did it as though they were already on Mars. The small team of scientists crossed what appeared to be a large impact basin, the result of a meteor strike that had happened literally billions of years before. That sort of thing.

  Anyway they crossed the dry lake.

  Stefan was keenly aware of the pointlessness of this practice experience. He didn’t usually narrate that truth, even to himself, but he knew.

  When they got close to their destination, the outcropping looming in front of them, he said aloud, laying on the Danish, “Do you want to go to the other side of the structure?” It sounded, even to him, like Do you want to go to de udda site off de stwuctcha?

  Mary stopped and turned her helmet toward him again. “What are you doing?” she asked, in her perhaps-real and perhaps-fake Nigerian accent.

  “What are you talking about?” he said, sweating. He thought it was very possible that the producers had put some sand inside his suit somehow, and added an extra layer of suit to it, just to make it hotter.

  Mars is meant to be cold, is something he would have liked to say to the producers.

  Maybe they weren’t just messing with him; maybe they were trying to drive him insane. And certainly he’d been increasingly irritable.

  “Your voice,” she said. “You’re not talking in your usual voice.”

  “I am,” Stefan insisted, sticking to words that sounded about the same either way.

  They stood there for a moment, with her studying his helmet, presumably.

  “I would go to the other side,” Tiago said, and he managed a visible shrug in his spacesuit.

  And so they agreed, Stefan thought. This involved going up a dune, a basically slapstick affair that none of them had mastered, but luckily it was not an enormous dune, and they got up there readily enough. They crested the lunette, and found themselves with a breathtaking view of the landscape, the countless aeolian features. This was land sculpted only by the hands of wind.

  “Pain in my ass,” Mary said. It was her inability to fake enthusiasm that was going to keep her off the rocket, in Stefan’s estimation.

  Though it had, it’s true, been a bit of a pain in the arse. And the hands of wind were in fact rather pushy today. In Denmark you might say it was blowing half a pelican.

  “Well,” he started, aiming for an accent somewhere in the middle, “the next part is easier.” He pointed downhill.

  And indeed the next part was largely a spectacle of sliding that resisted dignified narration. But then they were on the other side of the structure, and they opened up the sampling kit to get to the process of unearthing. UnMarsing. That was going to be a new word, Stefan reflected. Unmarsing. Plus a grounded person was going to be described as down-to-Mars, might even be the salt of the Mars, and people were going to have to move heaven and Mars to get things done, and nobody would have any Marsly idea what anybody was talking about.

  Stefan let out an unprofessional giggle.

  Mary looked at him again.

  “I’m just a bit uncomfortable in my suit,” he said, scratching himself ineffectually with his enormous spacesuit fingers.

  “Where should we dig?” Tiago asked.

  Stefan looked around. Orange everywhere. Basically barren. Occasionally on these forays they would see an emu, but, since there were obviously no emus on Mars, the team was under orders to ignore them here on simulated Mars. And today there weren’t even emus. Stefan pointed to the base of an outcropping thirty meters away, basically at random. “That one,” he said.

  And so they tromped over there and started digging. The process was to bag a few surface-level rocks and some surface-level sand, and also to dig down a meter or so into the clay to see if anything interesting was there. Nothing interesting would be there, obviously; it was just an exercise. But Stefan supposed it prepared them for what they’d be doing on Mars, and apparently the TV viewers found the digging entertaining. Stefan supposed heavy editing was involved.

  While they dug—steadily but also carefully, in case they miraculously came across something precious and fragile—the conversation died away. Probably the producers would have preferred some snappy dialogue, but there wasn’t very much to say. In any case it gave Stefan time to think. And not just narrator-style thinking—With hearts full of resolve, they dug deeper, in hopes of unmarsing something human eyes had never seen—but also bigger-picture stuff. Such as the old recurring que
stion of why he was so keen to do this. Why on Earth, so to speak, did he want—need—to go to Mars?

  Hvorfor ikke gå? said the Destination Mars! ads in Denmark. Why not go?

  But the opportunity had been more urgent to him than “why not?” It had felt almost like a duty, sending his application in, clicking “submit” on his computer with a buzz in his chest. A duty, yes. He had engineering skills that could help take humanity to other planets, to help spread civilization to other worlds. He had the strength of character to help carry the species’ footprints beyond the confines of its millennia-old home and out into the vast reaches of space and the known and unknown universe.

  Stefan pictured himself standing on a landscape much like this one, but millions of kilometers off into the darkness and the unknown. Orange mountains, swirling clouds overhead. A sandy wind rippling the air. And Stefan there, standing with his hands on his hips, the orange glow of a new land on all sides, nothing but the yet-to-be-discovered. The lone adventurer took a bold step forward, his whole soul—

  “How much deeper should we go?” Tiago said.

  Stefan blinked. “What?”

  “How much deeper?” Tiago said, pointing into the hole.

  Stefan felt a surge of unexpected anger. “The normal amount,” he said. “Why would it be different this time?”

  “You don’t have to bark at me,” Tiago said.

  Oh, God, Stefan thought. I’m stroppy lately. And now I’m going to have to talk about this for the video journal later. The TV people loved interpersonal drama. Stefan, in fact, wondered whether the most dramatic types were the ones who would get voted onto the rocket in the end. So maybe he needed to lean into it. Stefan tried to come up with a relevant Danish expression for the moment. The closest that occurred to him was Jeg er kold i røven—I’m cold in the ass—but that meant I don’t care, and it wasn’t such a good fit. And the Danish for wanker would probably get him in trouble. There were limits to even this stupid game.