The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  The same kind of thing is true of the human body after months of weightlessness. It’s different on Mars. But so is the human spirit. If I can use that term. So is human society, in fact, which is nothing more than a conglomeration of human psychologies. This doesn’t mean we have “gone native,” or have become “uncontrollable” and are running around in Martian loincloths. But, Ginger, when you start really experiencing life out in the universe, beyond the home planet, it’s life full of unpredictability, space-time curvature, and all of that. The reliable old truths about who humans are, and their relations to their bodies, these things become much more convoluted.

  But I’m still your dad, and I still love you, and I miss you, and I’m not going to stay here on Mars forever, if staying here means I don’t get to see what new ghastly piercing you have perpetrated upon your body. However, it’s almost Martian dawn, and my pet moon, Phobos, is going over the lip of the horizon, and I better get some sleep if I’m going to have the energy to test the ultralight.

  In the meantime, despite the great work Steve and Abu did extracting oxygen from the propellant stockpile, Steve has sunk into what Arnie is describing as a very serious clinical funk. I suppose I don’t trust the prevailing terminologies exactly, because they seem earthbound to me. Everyone here, to some degree, is struggling with feelings of misery about our lot. Abu has found that there’s some kind of rubbery silicone that is being produced as a by-product of the reactor and the propellant, and when he was through trucking spent fuel rods over to the fissure where we’re consigning them, he started trying to use the silicone goo to make Martian sculpture out there by the waste repository. Since then he’s spent a fair amount of time out in the desert, alone, erecting an army of these skinny, gooey-looking guys, as if to populate what is so unpopulated.

  Maybe because Abu has become busy and, perhaps, a little tired of his suite mate, or more likely because his son, back on Earth, has had a bad reaction to a mild case of flesh-eating streptococcus, Steve just went into a serious tailspin. You’ll recall that this son had strep throat early in the mission, which resulted in some bad scarring and ongoing circulatory problems, and then a stint in the clinic resulted in an opportunistic germ. Apparently the boy infected a nurse, who didn’t have quite as easy a time. It’s really too unpleasant to go into. Steve obviously took it extremely hard that he wasn’t at home during this emergency. Arnie ordered him to sit under the sunlamps by the reactor, and to double the dose of daily SSRIs he’s taking in his fluids. (In fact, Arnie recommended this to everyone.) I don’t know how Jim felt about it, but the idea that the guys from the Geronimo weren’t doing well was, for me, a bad sign about our progress.

  Similarly, Jim was spending a lot of time watching the rover on the radar screen. He honestly couldn’t figure out why Brandon hadn’t yet moved into the easternmost Valles Marineris. We’d tracked his movement over a few days, and we decided that maybe Brandon was just afraid to go to the canyon by himself, or perhaps had some reasonable hesitations about his project, what with the danger of wall collapses, avalanches, not to mention M. thanatobacillus itself. Or perhaps, Jim hypothesized to me and José, Brandon intended to remain within striking distance of the Excelsior. We had protective gear in our cargo bay. We had the ultralight. We had, via José, instructions on how to harvest the material. We had the best uplink with NASA. Jim felt we needed to keep a close watch on the encampment and its equipment. He radioed to the greenhouse and the reactor station and told them, as well, to lock everything down.

  The situation was made even more complicated by the sudden presence in the Tharsis region of a small dust storm. Now, I think I have explained a bit about Martian dust storms. For example, it’s a lot worse trying to take off or land aircraft in them, and that was why our government launched various unmanned explorers over the years. Often, the explorers orbited the planet for months, waiting for the sandstorm season to come to an end. The storms have been hard to photograph, because hunks of rock blowing around are inimical to photosensitive equipment—no matter how compact and solid-state. In fact, our own mission was designed to avoid the worst of the sandstorms that usually occur in Martian autumn. We are supposed to be gone by then. Spring, however, since it is a season with much variation in temperature, can spawn some activity. Which is to say that Mars has weather just like Earth. As a result, we had an idea what we were in for when the sun rose one morning sheathed in a brown-and-orange mist.

  The worst of it are the so-called dust devils. It’s not just that the wind whips up, and a lot of Martian detritus blows around, but you also get these tornadoes, with the traditional funnel clouds careening wildly across the Martian wastes, occasionally picking up heavier material, in just the way an earthly tornado would. We have seen from our few orbiting satellites that these dust devils sometimes transport old human space junk and deposit it hundreds of miles away. And you never know exactly which direction the funnel is going to go, either. It bloweth where it listeth.

  I told José that we were going to have to get everything that was outside, the laundry line, some of the machine tools, even the ultralight, back into the Excelsior, and then we were going to have to drive over to the greenhouse, to help Laurie and Arnie reinforce the polymer exterior to make sure they didn’t start leaking oxygen or losing temperature. This would kill all the plants. It was a long day securing everything, just like during the Atlantic hurricane season, and just as with a hurricane, we named the storm. We named her April. She was the first named storm on Mars. By the way, Steve and Abu showed up a bit later, and it was true that Steve was not himself. He seemed fainthearted, ghostly, slow to action, slow to respond.

  I suppose we should have expected that the storm would prove a harbinger of worse things. Isn’t there always some fell monstrosity that gets thrown up by these weather events? Think what happened with hurricanes of old, even in the past fifteen or twenty years in a period of heightened global hurricane activity. Think of the pressure exerted on coastal development by climatic change. But I guess I am referring more to the symbolic stuff that comes in a storm. If you think symbolically about it, you’d know that Brandon himself was going to turn up, that the storm was Brandon, somehow. The planet was using Brandon to show what it was hiding beneath its layers of sediment. Or at least this was what I thought about it later. Brandon was the interplanetary bringer of war, fighting back against a somewhat puny but determined Mars colony from planet Earth, the other seven of us. If we anthropomorphized the storm, it was maybe because we were waiting for Brandon.

  After we helped the others prepare, the three of us shut ourselves into the Excelsior and waited. We had dinner as we did most nights. And then we played cards. José was complaining that he kept losing, and that the two of us were ganging up on him. He said this in a good-natured way, not like the José of old. It occurred to me, because there are idle moments in life when you think about these things, that perhaps the José of old just never would exist again. With a serious head injury, you get these alterations in personality. They’re just rarely this pleasant. But then I made note of an even more interesting hypothesis. What if, kids, José had never injured his head at all? What if José Rodrigues was looking for some graceful way out of the military-industrial straitjacket that NASA had fitted upon him? It was a straitjacket that other Mars mission sociopaths still seemed to feel they needed to wear, but maybe José had had an interplanetary change of heart, a space epiphany. It was possible this new José was the more genuine one. I didn’t say this aloud, not while beating him at cards. There were many more months to live together. Who knew how many?

  We prepared for bed. Or at least Jim prepared for bed, because he always went to bed earliest, preferring to wake just as it was light. Like a monk. Jim had been complaining about sleep for some time, had begun relying on a certain sleep preparation, which I believed was going to run out before long. I was worried about him becoming habituated to the medication. He may have begun already, which would account, perhaps in p
art, for his short temper with me.

  For example, he was prone to complaining about how I chewed my food. I had, at some point in my youth, taken to heart advice I’d read that suggested that you should chew every mouthful of food thirty-two times. I had lived some of my life on Earth in a careless way where this kind of advice was concerned. Because of the dearth of food we actually were permitted to consume on the Mars mission, I had begun counting, nearly obsessively, each and every mastication. I almost felt guilty, somehow, if I swallowed before I had chewed the proper number of times. Then, one day, in a whimsical mood, I’d made the mistake of boasting about this to Jim. Since then, he had watched me eat, when he could bring himself to do so, with ever increasing amounts of agitation. Apparently, he had started counting my mastications as well. His other complaint referred to the wounded expression he said I wore each night when he elected to go to sleep and to leave José and me to do as we wished. No wonder he resorted to sleep aids. On the night in question, Jim, perhaps by reason of narcotics, was soon snoring the delightful little rasps that were his nocturnal communication.

  An hour or so later, after I had written my nightly bulletin post to Ginger and read a little bit of Marcus Aurelius, I found myself so drowsy that I fell asleep with my cabin suit still on, reading glasses still pinched onto my nose, having failed to brush my teeth, which was something I had started to fail to do, in the past weeks, because of the scurvy that was commencing to afflict me. Once your teeth start becoming loose, who gives a royal shit about them? Unless Arnie was going to give me some of the green peppers he was hiding away, I was just going to lose some of my teeth, and that would be that!

  The light went off down in the cargo bay, and then night was upon us. The Martian night, which by virtue of the lack of streetlamps and other light pollutants was of a fearsome intensity. We could hear the wind outside the Excelsior, in our dreamless and lonely states of unconsciousness, and we could hear the sand pelting the sides of the capsule, drifts of it accumulating. Or that is how I’m reconstructing it, since I was already asleep.

  A commotion awoke me. A scuffle of some kind. I didn’t know the hour. What difference do particular times make to a Martian colonist? Clocks are for the pointy heads back on Earth. Anyway, it was night and I heard something, and it was kind of quiet at first, but then it seemed a lot louder, a struggle nearly, an altercation. Astronauts pitted against others. Soon I was awake, and I was running, somewhat disoriented, down to the cargo bay, carrying a penlight. Of course I bodily fell down the ladder and landed in a heap on the lower floor. No bones broken. Banged up horribly. I gathered myself up on the way to the light switch.

  I noticed the cargo hatch door was open, obviously. There was dust and wind howling into the open hatch. The sand was blowing into the capsule, likewise the frigidness, that affrontery, which was bound to freeze up a lot of the electronics in the cargo bay if I didn’t work quickly, which naturally I did, without taking the time to see what had caused the breach of protocol. But at this point I did notice the two men struggling, those men whose identities you have now surmised. They danced into view. One of them was as dark as the night, or at least a dark mahogany, perhaps from coming this way in the storm. His space suit, which had once been polar bear white, was Egyptian henna, and his beard was longish and ragged. Brandon Lepper. I don’t know what had brought him to this, if this was interplanetary disinhibitory disorder or some bizarre conception of duty to the nation, but whatever the cause, he was now indisputably here.

  “Brandon, what the hell are you doing?”

  It took him a moment to register that he had now two assailants he was going to have to deal with, and in that interval, José, still in his blue capsule pajamas, managed to wrench himself free.

  José said to me, “Jed, get out of here. I’ll deal with it.”

  “No, you will not!”

  “Go get Jim. Go, go!”

  Brandon intended to employ a weapon, a homemade blade of his own devising. He’d sharpened up some industrial aluminum, no doubt harvested from one of the piles of space junk that he now called home, and he brandished it as if it were a twenty-first-century machete. Kids, I have had hand-to-hand-combat training. So have many of the astronauts on the Mars colony, since many of us came from branches of the military. Men had fallen before me on the fields of battle, dispatched by my hand. Brandon, meanwhile, was a welterweight boxer, and in this case he was a pugilist with a long, shiny blade. I called for Jim. I ran to the bank of monitors in the cargo bay, hit the intercom, and called for Jim again, cursing his medicaments. When I returned, Brandon had José pinioned beside the ultralight, and had the machete perilously close to his face. All of this took place in a curious silence. With the kind of progress that you can make in a lower-gravity environment, I was on him in a couple of bounding steps.

  I swear I could hear Jim snoring upstairs as Brandon flung me off his back. Brandon, in a bulky space suit minus the helmet, was having trouble maneuvering. José gave him a good smack in the jaw, a roundhouse, I suppose, and then winced with the pain of it, instantly clutching his right hand. In some kind of low-gravity thrall, I watched Brandon then raise up the machete, with a vigorous backswing that I associated with the best tennis players, and it was almost as if I saw my own heroics before they happened, the juncture in which I flung myself into the line of the backswing and held up my left hand—and thank heavens this was not my dominant hand. Just as José himself pivoted out of reach of his attacker, Brandon’s blade sliced clear through the thumb and first two fingers of my left hand. My fourth finger, with my bittersweet wedding band, likewise my pinkie, remained. In a silence marked only by the grunt of my own stunned shock, and by Brandon’s hiss of murderous intention, we all watched the fingers fly free. I then turned my gaze to the stumps, which had begun to fountain with blood, after which I collapsed onto the floor, clutching the mangled hand with the remaining good one.

  It could not have been long, the period in which I was immediately considering: (1) the availability of antibacterial cleaning solution in the nearby first aid area, (2) the possibility of a tourniquet so I wouldn’t bleed to death, (3) how to get the hell out of the way before Brandon cut off some fingers from the other hand. It could not have been long, this reverie, during which I was crouching underneath the ultralight aircraft, looking up at its fuselage, but this was plenty long enough to make José’s predicament even more dire. When I came to understand this point, I sat up, covered in a tie-dyed smear of gore, and watched as Brandon held tight to José’s head, and, with his mighty scimitar, sliced through all the veins and arteries in his throat. There was a desperate gurgling from the victim, from the man I had come to think of as my friend, and then an awful river of José flowed out onto the cabin floor, toward the drain where I coincidentally sat. I wish I could say that I did more. I wish I could say a lot of things now. I wish I could say that with my own hand bleeding profusely, I had been able to throw caution to the wind and wrestle that madman, Brandon Lepper, to the ground. But in the crucial moment, I writhed in the anguish of my own wound. José flapped wildly for a couple of seconds, holding his throat, as if he could dam up the gash, and then his body went still.

  Brandon turned to me again, and I cowered. Holding close the hand with the bloody stumps.

  Then he spoke to me. It was as if no such sound had ever before been uttered. Brandon said: “I’m wherever you don’t look. I’m around you. I’m in the air. I’m in the dust and the wind. I’m in the craters and crevices. Not one of you is safe until I lift off from the surface for home. Not one of you. Pass the word. Stay out of my business; stay out of the valley. Get it? Death came with the earthlings to Mars.”

  He raised the machete up again, but it was just some kind of lasting memory, some kind of emblem, one that I will not forget, one that has lingered in my imagination, one that I expect will linger there for a long time. He brandished the thing, and then he spared me.

  He went out through the hatch, leaving it ajar
, carrying a twenty-gallon drum of fuel, a packet of maps, and a laptop workstation, and as before, the howling wind was his calling card. I thought: Who will help me find my fingers?

  February 25, 2026

  We informed NASA the next day of José’s death, of the circumstances in which it took place. Was I alone in feeling that the response of the authorities was oddly cool? It was as though they had foreknowledge. Was it only me who thought that they had divided their loyalties, that some of them worked toward another dark objective, of which it seemed we would learn soon enough? Perhaps at Mission Control it was impossible not to find this division between the regular employees—with their adolescent dreams of interstellar travel—and those who thought only of that other mission, the Dark Objective, which had as part of its trajectory the desire to put a halt to Sino-Indian economic hegemony back on Earth, in the process claiming all the natural resources in the universe, wherever they may lie, and however this might be accomplished, for NAFTA interests.

  Maybe there were political appointees or moles at Mission Control who fed Brandon our itineraries and described to him our plans, just as there were others, on the other side of the ideological divide, our side, who seemed to accept the Mars First! ideological formulations of our chief theoretician and philosopher, Jim Rose. These fellow travelers understood that our political machinations, our consensus-gathering dinners, were crucial to the emerging history of this soon-to-be-developed world. Our decision-making process was impractical, slow, awkward, true, but then life on Mars was all of these things too.