Losing Mars

by Peter Cawdron

  That wasn’t Hedy speaking, it was Jen. “Are you okay?”

  She’s holding my hand. Her fingers are interlocked with mine, but that’s impossible. I’m wearing a spacesuit. Or I was. I’m sure I was. Gravity makes my steps clumsy, heavy. I stumble.

  Jen pulls me on. “Come on, silly. Your mom’s waiting.”

  “Mom?”

  Most of the trees have been denuded by the change of season. Thousands of leaves blow across the pavement, each taking their own path, tumbling at their own pace, drifting on a stiff breeze. The ground is on fire with splashes of red and yellow as autumn seizes the countryside. I remember this day.

  I’m wearing a thick jacket and jeans. We’re back home in Nebraska. I remember this day vividly, but not because it’s Thanksgiving. I freaked out. I had a panic attack. I’d never experienced anything like it before in my life. I remember blacking out. I felt overwhelmed with a sense of claustrophobia, as though I was trapped, dying, sealed in a spacesuit as though it were a coffin. It was so vivid.

  Afterwards, Jen sat with me on the porch, calming me as I blabbered about being lost in the darkness. I was shaking. I felt sure I’d be dropped from the astronaut corps if I told anyone. Jen comforted me. At the time, it seemed as though a phobia I never knew I had was unearthed, but why then? Why there? I was a mess. All I remember was being cocooned in a spacesuit as vapor formed on the inside of my helmet with the cold. And the darkness, the never ending darkness—it was impenetrable. Malignant. No stars. No life. No hope. I thought I’d been abandoned, that somehow I was dying alone in the depths of some cave on Mars.

  Mom smiles warmly as we walk up the wooden steps of the old cottage. Weeds grow up through the rose bushes planted on either side of the stone path. Paint peels off the weather boards on my old home. Mom holds her arms out.

  “How’s my spaceman?” She plants a kiss on my cheeks, wrapping her arms around me. I try to respond, unsure what’s real, patting her back softly. The weave of her sweater, the smell of her perfume, the warmth of her body. I’m here. I’m home.

  I’m not sure how long I’ve got, but I finally think I know what’s happening. I whisper in her ear. “Mom, see a doctor.”

  “What?” She leans back, looking at me as though I’m mad.

  I am.

  Jen stares at me sideways. I don’t think she heard what I said, but she’s surprised by my mother’s reaction. We’re here on a break in our training schedule. We’re about to tell Mom and Dad the big news, that we’re getting married. It’s a joyous occasion, or it’s supposed to be, but in six month’s time, Mom’s going to be diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer.

  “Please, Mom. Regardless of what happens next. Regardless of what I say or do, go and see a doctor. Trust me on this. You need a CT scan of your abdomen. Don’t ignore the pain.”

  “What has gotten into you?” She shakes her head, smiling warmly in the cool autumn air, but that’s a defense mechanism kicking in. She’s trying to resolve the contradiction before her—the excitement of seeing her eldest son contrasted against such a dire warning completely out of context. I try to explain, but to my horror, she fades to black.

  “No!” I yell, screaming, clutching at the vacuum in front of me. “No! Mom, no!” My gloved hands tremble, grabbing at the dust on the ground. “Please, Mom. Please listen to me.” My heart sticks in my throat. I feel sick knowing my warning went unheeded.

  I glance at my wrist pad computer. Five hours and forty five minutes. Only three minutes difference. That’s roughly the time I spent back on Earth. This isn’t a dream. It’s a glimpse into time. Past, present, future. Something within the alien structure is transporting me through spacetime.

  What is time but an illusion? In every other dimension, we’re free to move back and forth, but time has us shackled in chains, driven on beneath the crack of the master’s whip. Not any more. Not here on Phobos.

  “Why are you showing me this? What are you telling me?” I yell. Spittle sticks to the inside of my helmet. I turn, addressing the darkness. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  Want.

  That’s the key.

  Desire.

  The Chinese couldn’t control it, and with that thought I’m propelled through spacetime yet again, only I’m not surprised by what I’m seeing.

  Two taikonauts float in front of me in entirely different poses. One of them looks as though he’s reaching for an upper shelf with a gloved hand high above his helmet, the other is almost squatting, caught in what could be a fetal position from another angle. Their spacesuits are distinct, slightly smaller than ours and not as bulky. Thin blue bands support their shoulder and elbow joints, increasing their dexterity while under internal pressure. With a bright red Chinese flag on one shoulder and the CNSA logo over the chest, there’s no doubt these are the two survivors from the Huŏxīng Wu. Survivors? Like Hedy, they’re frozen—not physically, but their lives have been somehow suspended. They’re specimens in a museum.

  Their suits are still relaying telemetry and that’s being picked up by the wreckage of the landing craft and automatically routed on to the Huŏxīng Wu, fooling us into believing they were still inside the craft.

  Mentally, I retrace their steps. They must have arrived in orbit, set down in the crater, stumbled across the artifacts strewn over the dusty ground and retrieved one of them, returning with it to orbit. After having lain dormant for tens of millions of years, from what I can tell based on the chronology of the other specimens down here, these collection devices—snares, traps, or whatever—needed to wake. Perhaps they needed an energy source or were triggered by something like a change in temperature or pressure. Like Hedy and then me, the Chinese must have been lured in with glimpses of the past and the future. Once tripped, the device snatched its prey, transporting them down here just as it did with Hedy, only the Huŏxīng Wu suffered a catastrophic failure. The lander must have been docked at the time and was blown off when the craft depressurized, crashing on the surface of Phobos. Then we came along in the Redstone and the process replayed.

  I reach out, touching at the fabric of the taikonaut’s spacesuit, unsure what to expect. The thick, rubberized fingertips within my gloves don’t allow for much feeling, but the surface isn’t hard. The material in their suits is flexible. They probably didn’t understand what was happening to them or why. Even now, I only grasp a faint outline.

  As my mind shifts between thoughts so does the world around me, and I’m suddenly standing in the long corridor again, with my boots barely touching at the slick surface. I feel overwhelmed, frustrated. I fall to my knees, sinking to the floor in slow motion, as though I were in the neutral buoyancy tank back in Houston, drifting to the bottom of the pool.

  I can’t cope. I can’t deal with this. Time should be linear, not random. My head throbs. I want to take my helmet off, if only to rub at my temples and ease the pain. Arching one shoulder, I can lean my head to the side, pushing it against the padding of my helmet while pressing with my gloved hand against the slick surface to gain some relief. Ah, a slight scratch has never felt so good.

  Time is a dimension. Us Homo sapiens are caught in the stream, dragged on by the current, but not these creatures, not the aliens that built this installation. They’ve mastered the fourth dimension. They have the power of the gods.

  But what good did it do them? They died. From what I can tell, they were murdered. Seems that’s something we share in common with them—intelligence brings with it new and innovative ways to kill. For every two steps we’ve taken in advancing our own civilization, we’ve stepped back at least once, embracing our primitive nature, becoming more efficient at killing, more adept at slaughtering each other. Is that the curse of intelligence? Is violence a universal constant?

  I blink, and in the darkness, my location shifts again.

  Dust falls from my gloves. I get up off my knees. Hedy and the Chinese are nowhere to be seen. I’m somewhere else within the vast alien warehouse. Six hours and
eight minutes. I’ve jumped forward. I’m standing next to what look like microbial mats, the kind of algae that grows around the edge of a pond. Hedy must be further along. I’ve got to reach her. I push on, gliding between steps in low gravity. I’m less than ten minutes from her. Huh? It’s strange to see how quickly I’ve switched to thinking of time as a measure of distance.

  There are plants beside the walkway, then rodents with extraordinarily long snouts, then heavy-set birds with wings far too small to fly and feathers that look like tufts of fur. These are animals unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

  I see her ahead. As I approach, though, I’m torn away, back into the darkened corridor, only this time I’m not worried by the journey. I understand. It’s a form of temporal translation. All of these disjointed, fragmented sections of time will eventually link together, forming a chain. Ordinarily, on Earth or Mars, it would be unbroken and continuous. Up here, it’s as though time has been thrown into a blender, but all the links are there. I’ll live through each of them, just not chronologically. I’ll be back before Hedy soon enough, I know I will.

  Less than five minutes later, I find myself in the circular chamber, standing among the shattered remains of fallen alien creatures, watching as the ghostly apparition drifts before me.

  “I’m not afraid. Not of you. Not of any of this.”

  I reach out, watching as my hand passes through the hologram.

  “I understand what’s happening.”

  At least I think I do, or I thought I did. Grammatical tenses are confusing when time has no meaning.

  “You’re trying to understand us.”

  As those words leave my lips, I feel myself being dragged away, no longer bouncing around within the alien structure. I’m on Earth again.

  “Grandad. Grandad. Come quickly. Come.”

  A young boy pulls at my aging hand. My fingers are old and wrinkly while my shoulders are hunched, causing me to stoop in a manner that seems absurd to me but it’s a physical limitation. Try as I may, I can no more stand upright than I can fly.

  The home I’m in is stunning—light and breezy. Polished wood lines the floors. It’s an open plan design without any external walls. Glass runs from the floor to the ceiling around the room in panels several meters wide. There’s a white cornice forming a halo, marking the boundary between the glass wall and the ceiling, although the ceiling too is made from glass. I recognize the technology. It’s the same LED dimming process used on the windows of the Redstone. Its use in the ceiling means I can see birds flying overhead. The glass is astonishingly clean—no leaves or dirt or watermarks, but it’s dimmed slightly to provide shade.

  There are internal dry walls sectioning off what I guess are bedrooms and bathrooms, but there aren’t any corners or sharp edges within the house. The vast living room is neither circular nor oval. Instead, it’s a combination of curves following the shape of the hill on which the home is set. To one side, trees rise out of a grassy bank. On the other, a meadow leads down to a stream. We’re somewhere in the mountains. Not Nebraska. Perhaps Montana. Colorado? I’m not sure where I am, but there’s snow on the distant hills. The sky outside is radiant and blue. After so long on Mars, I’d forgotten what clear skies look like. They’re so vast, so beautiful.

  “Come, Grandad. You’re on TV.”

  “I am?”

  How far into the future have I gone? Why have I traveled to this point? Why here and now? For that matter, why was I transported to the news show while in orbit, or to watch my wife give birth? How does this work? Am I really here? Back in the Huŏxīng Wu, I could hear Jen yelling at me over the radio. It was as though I was in a dream. My mind seemed to play out her frustration, with her pushing me away from the hospital bed, convincing me it was an illusion, but this is real. I’m here. Is there some kind of link between past, present and future? Is there some means by which one affects the other?

  What do all these events have in common? There’s got to be a trigger, something magnetic about them, something that draws me to these points in spacetime. On this occasion, I think I know why I’m here. My mind is responding to the need to understand. As I stood before the alien apparition, everything came together. I grasped the magnitude of what was happening to me, of what will happen for all of humanity with the advent of this discovery. My time on Phobos changes everything. Our world will never be the same. Is that why I’m here now, walking through a sunlit kitchen toward a holographic projection set in front of a leather lounge suite in a sunken living room?

  There’s a woman making coffee. She’s in her thirties. She... She’s...

  “Jen?”

  “Dad. We’ve been through this.”

  My heart races at the meaning implicit in her comment—so much is conveyed with so few words. “Where’s Jen?” I look around, alarmed, frightened. “Where is she? What happened to my wife?”

  My adult daughter walks over, looking very much the splitting image of her mother—thick, straight hair with a natural part in the middle. Her hair even has the same cowlick on the right forming a wave that accentuates her rosy cheeks, while her eyes are dark but convey a sense of warmth and compassion. She rests her hand softly on my shoulder. “It’s okay, Dad. Everything’s going to be fine. Deep breaths.”

  “Please.” Tears run down my cheeks. “You don’t understand. I need to know. I—I can change this. I can fix it. This—this isn’t what you think.”

  She leans in, kissing me softly on my cheek. “Go with James, Dad. He’s excited. Let him show you.”

  James tugs, pulling on my hand, not understanding what’s happening between us. My daughter looks deep into my eyes. I want to say more to her but I don’t even know her name.

  A knot forms in my chest at the futility of the moment. I’m helpless. Not only can I see both the past and the future, I can live through both ends of this continuum but I’m unable to change anything, not a goddamn thing.

  James pulls me on, patting a spot on the couch next to a stuffed bunny. He points at the hologram.

  “See. Look.”

  An image roughly six feet in diameter floats above the plush red carpet. I can’t see where it’s being projected from, but the colors are vibrant. It’s slightly transparent. At night it must look entirely real, albeit with people that appear as though they’re trapped in Lilliput. The camera point-of-view shifts, rolling over a studio crowd and zooming in on the set as the show returns from an ad break. I sit there looking at myself in the hologram. I’m seated on a couch along with three other people, only I look as though I’m the sum total of their combined ages. Thin, straggly hair sticks out of my near-bald head at crazy angles. I reach up, touching at my head in response to the image, seeking confirmation.

  “I look so old.”

  “You are.”

  I glance down at James. “Thanks.”

  He smiles, thinking he’s being helpful.

  My daughter joins us, sitting next to me and patting my knee, relieved to see her senile father has calmed down. I hate to reinforce that notion, but I need to know what’s going on. I’m here in this time frame for a purpose.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s the fiftieth anniversary, Dad. You remember. You recorded this last week in New York. Remember?”

  I nod, playing along. Why here? Why now? There has to be a reason beyond simply the anniversary of the rescue.

  “And we’re back,” the host says, appearing not more than five feet from us and now looking roughly life-size. “My guests are Dr. Vanessa Jorgensen, Dr. Davina Patel from SETI, Professor Ibrahim Zafur, and of course, Shepard Astronaut, Cory Anderson. Before the break, we were talking about the controversy and conspiracy theories surrounding the rescue of the taikonauts on Phobos.”

  The host turns to face holographic me, smiling warmly with teeth whiter than the stars.

  “You’ve talked about some of the mistakes you made, but I wonder, if there was anything you could do differently back then, would you?”

&n
bsp; “No.”

  I’m not looking at her. I’m staring at the camera. I’m staring at myself. For that brief glimmer of time, I’m staring myself in the eye. There’s no doubt, no hesitation, no regret.

  The host seems a little flustered. I guess she was looking for more than a single word, but apparently I knew this is what I needed to hear. It’s bizarre hearing myself talking about not doing things I haven’t done yet—and not doing them any differently.

  “If you could talk to yourself back then, is there any advice you’d offer?”

  I smile. Here it is. Future me knows I’m sitting here watching him. Damn, I guess I’ve been waiting fifty years for this moment. It’s a chance to send a message back in time.

  “No… You have to understand. Life is not a quiz show. There are no right or wrong answers. There’s no decision that’s perfect. You make the best call you can and you have to live with that. I came close to blowing the rescue—too damn close too many times, but somehow, I made it.

  “I think this is what gets lost in all the debate. This isn’t armchair football on a Monday morning. I could have died up there. All four of us could have died that day. I think about that a lot. The books, the movies, the TV shows, they like to romanticize what happened in orbit around Phobos. They exaggerate, they embellish. Truth is, we were lucky. There were no heroics. No bravado. Just dumb luck.”

  This isn’t part of the narrative either so the host interjects, “You’re a hero in the eyes of many here on Earth and Mars.”

  “I did what was right, that’s all.”

  I’m intensely curious about future me. I can see I’m pulling my punches. I’m clearly tempted to say more, but I’m holding back, trying to keep the discussion short and clipped. Seems I’m all too aware I’m being watched by a time traveller.

  My daughter squeezes my hand. I guess she’s grown up in the shadow of this event her whole life. She’s got her mother’s warmth. I go to say something but suddenly I’m staring at a wall within the alien base on Phobos. Yet again, I’ve been robbed of time.

  Etched on the smooth metal in front of me are two English words: