How to Mars

by David Ebenbach

  4. Though actually he did have legitimate things to mutter about. Because, on top of all of the other things, strange things were starting to happen in the habitation dome. Lights were flickering sporadically; water pressure was fluctuating now and then. More alarmingly, appliances were sometimes turning on and off without anyone touching them. Stefan was busy trying to figure all of that out. But meanwhile—and this didn’t seem like an engineering problem—a few of the Marsonauts said they were occasionally hearing something like voices—distant, muffled, sounding like questions—when nobody was talking. It was unsettling. And enough of that kind of thing was going on that some people back on Earth were talking about gremlins.

  Suffice it to say that quite a few nails were getting bitten among the television audience.

  Despite all this, the Marsonaut who was an Air Force captain and a doctor and who had a big following among the African American demographic—Nicole—suggested one night during dinner that they plan a baby shower. She said that it was “a beautiful family tradition.” She had in the new run of the show become very interested in family activities.

  Reactions among the Marsonauts varied. Trixie, for one, actually jumped out of her seat and pumped her fist. “Paaaar-TY!” she said. She was on the whole well-liked in her home country of Australia, and certainly much-discussed there. Australia had in fact been one of the last countries to stop watching the original series. One of the big questions about her was how she managed to keep her hair dyed up on Mars. Usually red; sometimes pink; very occasionally orange. And her roots never showed! It had to be a regular part of her grooming regimen, but somehow and for some reason the show kept the process secret.

  But Jenny, the presumptive focus of the event, waved Nicole’s idea off and said, “Oh—come on—you don’t have to do anything like that.”

  Josh, who had lately been frustrating viewers with his hot-and-cold attitude about becoming a family man, put his burrito down, leaned over, and put his arm around Jenny. “I think it sounds nice,” he said. (You could feel the public Josh-o-meter shifting more positive.)

  Roger, the Canadian geologist and botanist who had a following mainly among other geologists and botanists, said, quietly, “Sure.”

  But Jenny pushed her dish away and asked, “But what’s a baby shower for? Isn’t it for giving gifts? Everything we have is already here. Wouldn’t you just be forced to give us things we already have?”

  Some of Earth’s audience found her difficult. And some of that reaction may have been racism.

  “I’m learning how to knit,” Roger said, dipping back into his bowl of soup. It’s true that there were a few non-scientist viewers who had fallen for him as this new side—crafty and paternal—had started to come out. And he was somehow looking more buff in the new series. Lighting? Camera angles? Every once in a great while you’d see someone wearing a T-shirt that said i prefer roger.

  “An event of this nature is also about marking the transition to parenthood,” Nicole said crisply. “And it’s an occasion for us to come together.”

  “Plus it’s a party!” Trixie said. She was still standing. “It’ll be fun!”

  Stefan was not at the table—he had given up on group meals—but, as Trixie said “It’ll be fun!” the editors cut to an image of him, working alone under the Mars rover outside, muttering in his unsettling way.

  Overall, there was enough support for the idea that it went forward. Nicole and Trixie took charge of the planning, and started having meetings to talk about food and party activities. There were disagreements. Nicole wanted something more sit-down, and Trixie wanted something involving more dancing. Not so much Jenny, obviously, at this stage of the pregnancy—she would probably dance in her chair—but everybody else. Also, Trixie was thinking pub munchies—fried, savory things—and Nicole was thinking petit-four-type things. Small sweets. So these disagreements were problem number one. Not insurmountable, but needing to be surmounted.

  It did also take a while to figure out what to do about gifts. It was true, what Jenny had said—it wasn’t like there was a store to go to, and all the new stuff they would need for the baby was on a supply rocket that was expected pretty close to the due date. Nicole didn’t want to wait for it. “Consider this: what if the baby comes early?” she said. “You can’t have the shower when the baby’s here.”

  “You can’t?” Trixie asked.

  “You can’t,” Nicole said.

  The viewers had not realized that Nicole was so traditional—she never talked about family in the first run of the show—but there it was.

  “Plus, those supplies are issued from HQ,” she said. “They’re not from us.”

  Which decided that. In the end they took their cue from Roger, who was starting to knit a pair of booties, and decided that everyone had to make something for the baby.

  “Gender neutral colors,” Trixie said when she told Stefan by the oxygen distributor he was working on, wagging her stethoscope at him. She had definitely gotten better, wasn’t examining Jenny seven times a day now, but she still kept her doctor’s tools with her at all times, just in case.

  “I’m not going to come,” Stefan said, with a slight frown, like he was explaining something very obvious.

  “You’re . . . not . . .” Trixie started.

  “Coming,” he said, before returning to the distributor.

  This, then, was the next problem: Stefan wasn’t coming, and on the one hand it didn’t seem like a great idea for him to be there if he didn’t want to be, but on the other hand losing him would reduce the number of non-parental party guests by twenty-five percent. In the end they resolved it by having Nicole go tell him that he had to show up and had to play nice. It was a longstanding dynamic that he was scared of Nicole.

  Stefan, who was Danish, was nonetheless not wildly popular among the Danish audience. And some engineers were not sure that he represented them well, either. It was his presence on the mission—and, to a lesser extent, Roger’s—that made some people wonder if the Destination Mars! corporation had really listened to audience votes when putting the group together.

  Anyway, Nicole found him in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. “Attendance is mandatory,” she said. She didn’t even say baby shower explicitly (or, if she did, the editors cut it out); she just said “Attendance is mandatory,” and waited for him to nod his understanding, and then she left.

  As you can imagine, the T-shirt people got busy right away on Attendance is Mandatory.

  Another problem was the argument Jenny and Josh had about whether the shower was just for her or whether it was for both of them. He thought it’d be nice to make Jenny the focus—she was carrying the baby, after all—and she thought he was resisting fatherhood. “Do you want us to be a family or not?” she said.

  Meanwhile, Stefan found himself getting busier, because things were going a little more haywire throughout Home Sweet in the lead-up to the party. The lights got flickerier and also started glaring at other times, and the HVAC became newly unpredictable—too hot and then too cold, randomly. The same thing was happening with the water heater, and the water pressure was up and down more wildly and frequently. The oven went fully on the fritz, putting party snack prep in doubt. Some faint but odd smells came and went throughout the dome. And though viewers were beginning to wonder if Stefan was behind all the mechanical problems—trying to get the party canceled, maybe—he actually looked pretty bewildered by the whole thing, even when the other Marsonauts weren’t watching him.

  It was not lost on anyone—Marsonaut or Earthling TV watcher—that these minor glitches, if they became major, could cancel the party by, well, killing everyone on the planet.

  So Stefan rushed around looking into everything that had an electrical pulse, as the others (and the viewing audience) looked on with some anxiety. The thing about Mars is that it may be dull, but only until your oxygenator stops working.


  There was also some speculation online about whether the Destination Mars! corporation itself was messing with the six inhabitants, either as revenge for the pregnancy or in order to drum up drama for the show. But nobody could come up with a good explanation for how they could wreak so much havoc from so far away, and it was pointed out that they had a lot to lose if something went too wrong and everybody on Mars died—not only the profits from the TV show, but also their whole reputation as a company that had started the first civilization on Mars. And that was a good point.

  There were those people who felt something more astounding was responsible. People on Earth who had been saying “gremlins” started to use the word aliens.

  Of course, there were also people who used the words ghost Martians—mainly because the flickering lights had a kind of supernatural quality—which, aside from inspiring a name for a one-hit-wonder band that same year, served mainly to remind the public that a lot of people were prone to questionable thinking.

  And then the virus hit, or the bacteria, or parasite, or whatever it was. Trixie and Nicole couldn’t figure out what it was—it seemed like proof of Martian life until they failed to find any sign of anything in anyone’s blood or anywhere else—but it hit each Marsonaut in turn, or almost each. There was a fair amount of vomiting. The show handled it tastefully enough; the stricken person would dash off to the bathroom and the editors would stick to a shot of the rest of the people, glancing uneasily at one another while sounds of disgorgement—muted sounds—could be heard in the background.

  It was not lost on anyone that some viruses killed you.

  Luckily, the “Mars flu” didn’t last long—just a few days—but it was nasty while it was there, and it left everyone wiped out after. They spent days on the chaises longues in the common room just rehydrating.

  Again, none of the analyses—checkups, throat swabs, blood tests, examination of the foods people had eaten, et cetera—revealed anything. They couldn’t even tell how it was being spread. There were only two clues: (1) the disease progressed in age order, beginning with the youngest person (Trixie, who was still in her twenties in Earth years) and ending with the oldest person (Stefan, who was fifty-three), and (2) the disease skipped right over Jenny. But nobody could figure out what the clues meant. The Marsonauts didn’t actually call it the Mars flu—that was an Earth thing. They called it the WTFlu and hoped it wouldn’t come back.

  Trixie pulled Josh aside and said, in a voice right out of a sci-fi thriller, “You see? There’s something here on this planet. Something we can’t detect with human tools.”

  The band Ghost Martians dropped their first (and only) hit soon after. The song was also called “Ghost Martians.”

  Party planning went on anyway—Nicole insisted on it, even when she was the sick one. “We can rally,” she said to Trixie in one rousing between-vomits scene by the toilet.

  “But what if it hits Jenny next?” Trixie asked, biting her nail.

  That’s where the first of the two-episode sequence ended—Is Jenny next? over a shot of Jenny looking worried; then, Can the two lovebirds survive what’s to come? over a shot of Josh and Jenny looking worriedly at each other; and, finally, Will there even be a party? over a shot of everyone worrying out in the common room, aside from Stefan, who was off in the bathroom making muted regurgitation sounds, the lights flickering.

  They started the next episode by picking up a few seconds before where they had left off.

  “We can rally,” Nicole said to Trixie by the toilet.

  “But what if it hits Jenny next?” Trixie asked, biting her own nail.

  “It won’t,” Nicole said, closing the scene.

  And of course she couldn’t be sure, but it turned out she was right; Jenny never did get sick. Trixie checked her relentlessly, as she had before Josh talked her down, but the mother-to-be never showed any symptoms, and eventually Trixie relaxed again. On Earth there was speculation that the pregnancy protected Jenny because the disease was focused on age, and the fetus didn’t technically have an age yet. But then certain religious people got up in arms about that and there was a brief but passionate movement for all true believers to petition the government to add nine months to their official age, to signify that they had begun living at conception.

  In any case, the party went forward. The disease was winding down and the mechanical problems weren’t getting worse, at least. People, once their hydration levels had recovered, were busy making their gifts. Nicole and Trixie settled on a menu that didn’t involve using the ongoingly-fritzy oven—little sandwiches, mainly. Things came together. Not neatly, not tidily—honestly there was a lot of obvious anxiety all around—but of course neat and tidy would have made for bad television.

  Then, on the day of the baby shower the bathroom showers stopped working altogether, and the heads started making very loud noises when on. It was an intriguing coincidence, shower/showers. (“You see?” Trixie said to Josh.) Or it would have been intriguing if it hadn’t been another entry in the worrying column. These people had lived together for more than two years already, so they were not particularly put off by the prospect of a little extra body odor—it was hardly the first time that any of them had gone unwashed for a day—and Stefan got to spend the morning working in the bathroom, muttering almost cheerfully. (As astute viewers had observed, he was most content when his machines needed him.) But most everybody would have felt a lot better if things stopped going wrong.

  In the early afternoon, Nicole and Trixie determinedly made the sandwiches—little ones, made little by cutting regular-sized ones into quarters, and of various kinds: turkey, peanut butter and honey, cream cheese frosting (as a concession to Nicole), pepper jack and potato chips (as a concession to Trixie), and so on, all presented on plastic plates that were used in the place of silver trays they didn’t have. Mars had not been set up for classy entertaining, but they were doing their best.

  While they were preparing the food, Josh and Jenny and Roger were sniffing around the common room. A slight smell, new and unrelated to the unshowered state of affairs, had developed—something like egg salad, but intensified egg salad—and they couldn’t find where it was coming from, other than somewhere in the common room.

  Smell or no smell—nobody was able to track it down—the party started in the common room in the mid-to-late afternoon. (People watching knew that the Martian day was fairly similar in length to Earth’s day, so they understood what afternoon meant. They could relate.) Things were reasonably festive. Trixie had strung up some toilet paper that she had dyed—again, through some mysterious source—pink and blue, alternating. There was music on the newly-repaired sound system. Not dance music, exactly—yet, anyway—but baby-themed stuff: Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” Maroon 5’s “Baby, Oh,” Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young,” The Chicks’ “Lullaby,” The Supremes’ “Baby Love,” and so on, plus also Ghost Martians’ “Ghost Martians,” because why not.

  And there were activities.

  Nicole clapped her hands together and said, almost angrily, “Okay. Who wants to do a few party games?”

  Trixie hollered, and Josh said “Me!” brightly (a little too brightly, some viewers thought), and Jenny raised her hand with a smile. Roger said, “Sure,” and Stefan looked around the room for more signs of trouble that could occupy him, but then said, “Yes, absolutely,” under Nicole’s level gaze.

  So they began with belly-guessing. They needed Roger’s yarn for this, and scissors. The idea was that everybody had to cut a length of yarn that they thought was the current circumference of Jenny’s abdomen. However, not everybody was allowed to participate—Trixie already knew fairly precisely how Jenny measured, and Nicole knew because, doctor to doctor, Trixie had already told her. And it was suggested that Josh would have an unfair advantage because he slept with his arm over Jenny every night, and, as for Jenny, she was just supposed to watc
h and enjoy. So, in the end it was just Roger and Stefan, and both of them overestimated the circumference, but Stefan was off by more than a foot—“Is that how big you think I am?” Jenny said, incredulous—so Roger won. There were no prizes, but Stefan still looked at Roger with troubling hostility afterward. And then he said something about what did it matter how big Jenny was if the habitation unit blew up around them.

  The next one broke up some of the tension with a little humor. They all—everybody was included this time—had to tape index cards to their foreheads, and then each person was supposed to draw a picture of what they thought the baby would look like, but on the cards on their own heads. So in the end there was marker on people’s faces and the drawings turned out to be these pretty amusing impenetrable scribbles. Though, with all the background anxiety plus risks surrounding being pregnant on Mars, some of the viewers saw dark prophecies in those scribbles.

  They had gotten to the game of looking at each other’s baby pictures and guessing who was who—not as hard as it sounds, given that Nicole, Jenny, and Trixie were the only people of color there and Trixie’s skin was distinctly lighter than Jenny’s which was lighter than Nicole’s, and also that baby Josh already had the same dark, curly hair he’d brought to Mars—when the egg salad smell suddenly became unbearable. The television screen couldn’t convey that, of course, but you could see it on the Marsonauts’ expressions, all of which squinched up tight.

  “Oh, God,” Jenny said. “What even is that?”

  Trixie covered her face. “That is rank, is what it is.”