How to Mars

by David Ebenbach

  People said that the child would be abnormal. And in some sense she was, by definition. There was no statistical precedent for her. But essentially she was the same type of creature as the creatures that have been born from humans for two hundred thousand years now. She emerged incomplete, like the rest of us, and she entered into a vast but similarly incomplete universe like the rest of us, and she stood and walked as soon as she could, and she went off in pursuit of completion from that point on.

  Of course, the child had help. She had two parents and there were four other adults besides, which is a small social circle—one of the smallest in human history, surely—but not an empty one.

  Also there were those goldfish, and, soon enough, the offspring of goldfish.

  The adults had been hand-chosen. Not for parenthood or for watching over children at all—in fact, as they had been chosen for a one-way mission, they were chosen mainly for their technical skills and for their self-sufficiency, for their tendency not to need anyone new or perhaps even to know what to do with them if they appeared. They were all quite limited. Still they rose to the occasion, as people sometimes will. One of the adults taught the child to drive the rover, and another taught her how to take a person’s temperature and blood pressure, and another taught her how to disable a person by punching that person in the throat, and another taught her how to make a plant grow from a seed. These adults taught her to read and write, to cook, to repair circuit panels and the tread of space boots. They taught her biology and physics and astronomy and chemistry and geology and engineering and the workings of the human mind.

  The child was, it’s true, abnormally clever. Her mind was very quick, and also very deep, a combination quite unlike a metaphorical river. You could fill it and fill it and still it would move briskly along.

  One example: she was the first person to demonstrate definitively that Mars was alive, and in a way that you couldn’t find in a water sample, or see or hear at all with your normal senses. The way that Mars is alive remains hard to describe to this day. But the humans and the Martians have found each other, and they mostly get along pretty well, and that’s what counts.

  The adults around her grew older, too, as adults will. Her parents never did have another child but they had no regrets, either, which is not nothing for adults. They were Mars’ first family, and knew it, and they celebrated it, with many special occasions and special food that they made for those occasions and special thoughts the rest of the time and special looks on their faces, too. It could have been otherwise. The father had been worried that none of this would ever come to pass, and the mother worried that something would go bad once it did happen. Both reveled in their wrongness. It was, they felt, the greatest wrongness that had ever been.

  They and the others continued their work on Mars, which was work they had sometimes forgotten to do before the child was born. But they got back to it. They studied the stars and they studied the soil; they built machines and they repaired them and one another, as necessary and in various ways. The engineer among them, using materials sent on supply rockets and materials taken from the planet itself, did over time build new domes so that they might each have private spaces—he was always a bit of a loner—but the domes were all clustered so that the people could come together, too, which was something they persistently did. Even sometimes the engineer.

  The child became a teenager, in the way that children do. Except in her case it technically took both longer and shorter than it had all the other humans in human history. Longer because it took more than twenty-four Earth years before the child’s age, in Martian years, had teen at the end of it. And shorter because she was already behaving like an Earth teenager by the time she was, in Martian years, six.

  The people of two planets realized that numbers were just numbers.

  By this point there were other adults on Mars—Earth had sent more—and there were other habitation centers, and people were doing things to warm the planet up a little, in a nice way, and shift the air just a bit toward breathable, and soon people didn’t even all live in the same place on the planet, and eventually there were other children being born. But this first child would always be the first child. And the first adults knew one another best, and they continued to live close together.

  By now there were generations of goldfish—bountiful, seemingly endless.

  And then one day the child—she was a young woman by then—came to Earth. When the colony started on Mars, the rule was that it would be a one-way trip because nobody had the technology to go both ways. But the child motivated people—they wanted to bring her to Earth—and her growing up gave them a few years to think their way through solutions.

  She and her parents got on a rocket that was the first rocket to ever leave Mars for Earth. It felt the way rockets do, which was not something the young woman knew about from personal experience.

  During the trip, which despite technological advances was still several months long, the family floated in the lack of gravity, which was disconcerting at first, but they got used to it—the parents for the second time—and they told one another all the stories.

  When the rocket arrived, everyone on Earth called it a homecoming, and there were crowds and balloons and all the usual things that people make and do when they’re greeting a hero. As the young woman stepped out, she was understandably overwhelmed—video representations can’t prepare you for this sort of thing, the sound, the sight, the motion, the great clamor that we specialize in here. And obviously this wasn’t a homecoming; she’d never been to the planet before. She was, unless there’s something we don’t know, the first human to become an adult before seeing the Earth.

  The young woman honestly found it a heavy place; she was used to much less gravity. Her parents, too, were shocked by the difference, especially after those months floating in the rocket—but nostalgia kicked in for them, and it was okay. They saw the things they had once seen, and were even reunited with some people they had left behind. There were tearful family reunions that salved places that needed salving.

  The young woman, for her part, never quite felt fully upright on Earth. Nor did she get used to the clamor, which was indeed dramatic and more so all the time. Not just because of her, but because that’s the way we’ve always gone—toward more clamor. Nor did she even get used to the colors, which were, she thought, too vivid and too many. She was accustomed to a uniform red-orange and, as it turned out, she preferred it. Though there were Earth things she liked—the sensation of wind on her face, and the feel of a cat’s fur under her hand. A real bagel.

  Over the next few months, there were many speeches and many ceremonies in her honor. Her parents accompanied her to each one and they felt a pride in their child that had never been felt in the universe before, and that had also been felt billions of times already. The young woman endured it all with grace and difficulty.

  We had never thought about what Earth would look like to a stranger. Earth being the cradle of the species, the garden of our evolution. It was our great given.

  The people of Earth realized that nothing was a given.

  Then, as soon as it was possible—it took almost two years—she got herself back on a rocket and went home again. Her parents gladly went with her, and they brought a cat along, though her father was slightly allergic. There were pills for that.

  In space, between Earth and Mars, they floated. The mother floated and the father floated, and so did the young woman, and even the cat floated. It was disconcerting at first, especially for the cat, who was about to be the first cat on Mars.

  By the time they got there, Mars would already be starting to edge toward green, new patterns spreading across the planet. Things were changing. But slowly. In measured steps.

  Meanwhile, those of us still on Earth felt another change. It was palpable, in the wake of the departing rocket taking that young woman away again: gravity, for all of us,
was rapidly losing its hold.

  How to Use this Handbook

  (Section 36 of the unofficial Destination Mars! handbook, as written by the founder of Destination Mars!)

  First of all, count yourselves very lucky indeed that you even have this handbook. Did the Apollo astronauts have a handbook? Did the astronauts on the International Space Station have a handbook? We’re not sure, actually, but, if any of those folks did have handbooks, in any case they weren’t like this one. And so you are fortunate people, who can make your way into the universe with some assistance, assistance we have been very glad to provide.

  That said, your success in your new life does depend somewhat on how well you use this handbook. Which is why this section exists. Read on.

  In our time, people are reputed to have short attention spans, and we are told that texts need to be a very particular length if they are to be accessible to contemporary readers. This handbook was not designed with these facts in mind. Or, rather, it was designed with these facts in mind, but with the intention of upsetting those short spans of attention. Some sections will be too long, and you will have to stay with them; others will be too short, and you will be left with idle time on your hands. We will be interested to see how well you handle the situation, and what becomes of you.

  We will not be using this section to summarize the other sections of this handbook. You can read those other sections for yourselves. And perhaps you already have, and then we’d be wasting everyone’s time.

  A word to the wise: it would probably be better to familiarize yourselves with the contents of this handbook before you need them, instead of waiting until you need them very desperately. Desperate readers may not be level-headed readers. Also, considering the handbook’s ideas out of context might lead to new and creative connections that nobody could foresee. Like paging through a cookbook while you’re very full; you might suddenly imagine yourselves with a future in color photography, or you might wonder why some fruits are sweet and others are spicy or even flavorless. This handbook presumably offers similar opportunities for divergent thinking, and you wouldn’t want to miss that.

  Some will choose to read this handbook from front to back—and we did, for sure, put a great deal of effort into deciding the order of the sections. There’s a reason why we talk about how to work with your machines before we talk about how to work with other people, or why we discuss boredom before death. There’s a reason why this section is the last one in the book. Still—you are free agents, and you will read in whatever way you decide to read. That’s the nature of people. And let us be the first to admit that there is a great deal about this handbook that even we don’t understand, and so we are not about to try to control your experience.

  Still—it’s probably best not to read the entire handbook in one sitting. That would trivialize the work that went into the handbook, which certainly took more than one sitting to write.

  One of the worst things about bad handbooks is the way they quickly become dated. After all, knowledge is always growing, so documenting reality can be a somewhat thankless task. One solution is to update the text from time to time, which has significant downsides, including the amount of work it would require. The other solution, and the one we’ve adopted, is to focus the text mainly on broad principles (e.g., flexibility, diligence, acceptance of one’s fate). Not only are these unlikely to change, but they can be applied to new situations in a way that up-to-the-minute toaster oven instructions cannot. (This is the difference, you understand, between a handbook and a manual.) We’ve therefore aimed our writing at a level of generality that ought to serve you best and which may, at times, even strike you as profound.

  One of the central questions: is this book a how-to, or is it a what-to or when-to or where-to—or could it even be a why-to?

  Note that if you do read this handbook differently than we’ve anticipated or if you apply our information and guidelines to situations we haven’t outlined or in ways we haven’t suggested, we cannot be held responsible for the results. Legally or even ethically.

  There is a table of contents in this handbook, but no index. We didn’t want to coddle you.

  Nor are there any appendices. An appendix seems to us to be a subordinate, second-class kind of chapter, and we value all our chapters equally. We hope you will do the same.

  No handbook can ever claim to be complete, and the responsible ones refrain from making that claim. We are going to take that discretion a step further by proclaiming the incompleteness of this handbook. Indeed, there are many subjects—even potentially crucial ones—that you will not find covered here. Sometimes this is because there are things we don’t know, and sometimes because there are things that we don’t know that we do know, or that we know but we don’t know that you want to know them, if you see what we mean. And sometimes things are missing because we decided to leave them out. It has been observed that, in many aboriginal cultures, craftspeople intentionally build flaws into the textiles and pottery they make, with the understanding that humans are incapable of perfection. We’ve always found that very compelling.

  When you do encounter a gap in the handbook, don’t become panicked. There is meaning in absence just as there is meaning in presence. In fact, there may be more meaning in absence. The only difference is that you have to figure out what it is.

  You can certainly reach out to us whenever you like. Bear in mind, however, that it takes six months for us to get supplies to you. Month to month, in other words, you’ll be making do with what you have. But it’s even more minute than that. You know, for example, that it takes eleven minutes to get a message from us; by the time you get it, it’s already a little bit out of date. Not hugely, but enough to make you feel slightly unsettled when you get that message. What is this, exactly? you’ll ask. Don’t worry; you will get used to these delays, for better and for worse. You will change the way you think about your situation and about us and the connection between the two. We may eventually come to seem very remote, almost unreal, to you. We may come to seem like something you’ve made up in order to comfort yourselves in times of uncertainty. This is natural, though we’re not sure that we will be at our most comforting in those times.

  Which leads us to this: you’re on your own. Moment to moment, you’ll be the one living this life of yours. And of course this has always been true, though never before in the exact way that it’s now true for you. Which has also always been true. This is, in some sense, the human tradition. And the human tradition is yours. It’s yours to experience, and it’s yours to inhabit, and it’s yours to live forward in your own particular and imprecise way.

  Every day is the same question: what will you do with this day, as a free person in a free universe where nobody but you has the power to make that decision for you?

  If this handbook helps you along the way, we will be very glad. But we also know that you will mostly find yourselves in the gaps, where we cannot reach you, and where you cannot reach us. You will make meaning where and how you can.

  We have been told that this is what it means to be alive.

  Afterword

  I started writing this novel in 2015 after reading a stunner of a news story about something called Mars One. This, I discovered, was a company (now bankrupt) that had put out a call for applications; they said they had plans to send twelve people on a one-way trip to Mars. Even crazier, by the time I found about them, they were claiming that 200,000 people had applied. It was hard to tell whether the organization was visionary or deranged or fraudulent, but the idea of going to Mars with no option to come back struck me as totally insane, and it got me wondering just who would sign up for such a thing: to leave Earth forever, to never see any other people aside from the other folks sent on the mission, to never feel a breeze or pet a dog or sit under a cherry tree in bloom. Never, ever again.


  So, in a state of shock, I wrote a short story—“Prakt Means Splendor,” now the first chapter of this novel—about a group of people stuck on Mars with no way home, and who had just learned that one of them was pregnant. (Mars One was also famous for its rule that participants would not be allowed to have sex.) Each character had had reason to leave Earth forever. What would happen now that these dead-enders suddenly had to consider the possibility of new life?

  The next thing I wrote was a short story called “What You Can’t Bring With You,” which took the form of rules and instructions from a fictional organization pushing a Mars-One-like mission. I wrote it because I was still stunned by everything these Mars One applicants were willing to leave behind. (I usually write about things I don’t understand. Doing so helps me understand a little better.) The story also came because I was interested not just in the applicants, but also in the idea of a company willing to play G-d, cheerfully ready to relocate humans from one planet to another.

  The stories—soon enough I was thinking of them as chapters—spilled out from there.

  Along the way I did a lot of intentional reading, because I hadn’t ever written much about space travel. Some of the standouts from the stack of both fiction and non-fiction: Jennifer A. Howard, You on Mars: Failed Sci-Fi Stories; Lee Billings, Five Billion Years of Solitude; Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles; Tom Gauld, Mooncop; Anthony Michael Morena, The Voyager Record; Stephen Petranek, How We’ll Live on Mars; Rod Pyle, Curiosity; Mary Roach, Packing for Mars; and Robert Zubrin, The Case for Mars.