The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  We buried José the next day. (It required blowtorches.) I don’t think I remembered to tell you that he’d spent a little while trying to find a way to introduce Icelandic moss onto Mars. He figured that Iceland’s ecosystem was most like what we had on the surface here. He figured that moss could perhaps adapt to the barrenness of Mars. It was just a hunch. He’d attempted to do some transplanting outdoors. He’d designed the experimental protocols himself. Unlike the greenhouse, where we were trying to terraform Mars a couple square inches at a time according to instructions from the home planet, José had brought a bag of carefully mixed soil and fertilizer to a deep crater near the Geronimo, where there were outcroppings of bedrock, and he had attempted to propagate this Icelandic moss. After all, he’d argued, there was a lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere, as well as in the soil, and this was much to the benefit of Icelandic moss. He was completely hopeful about it, all by himself, going out there an hour or two every other day, with a tiny measuring cup full of recirculated water. He didn’t really care how long it took. Or so he told me.

  We buried him there.

  I had a Bible with me on Mars. I understand that many of you think of Bibles as tools for propaganda. Yet I am the kind of person who likes the sweep, the grandeur, and the reverence that I find in the Bible. However, at José’s funeral, I was outvoted. We decided that a reading from the Bible was not a proper Mars First! tradition. We needed, Jim argued (and Arnie and Laurie agreed, especially now that she was beginning to show), to start imagining different and more Mars-centered epics of spiritual literature. We needed myths of origins that began on this place, that bound together this small community of wayfarers. Accordingly, we decided that there would be no reading at all at José’s funeral. Instead, Jim simply asked if anyone had anything they wanted to say. A tradition was born, if out of misfortune.

  By now the dust storm had passed us, heading off in a southeasterly direction, so it was a clear day. Warm for Mars. We stood and waited for inspiration.

  Finally, Jim said, via walkie-talkie, “José, you were one of the really good people on the mission, because you were one of the people who grew here on Mars. You were a different person, when you died, you were not the man who set out to conquer this unforgiving place, and I have to think that this planet brought that out in you. And while I don’t want to be hopeless at a time like this, my friend, I think I failed you. I think I failed you by not seeing that you had the potential to rise to this occasion. I will miss you therefore, and I will use what you have taught me as I go forward from here. I will not fail the remainder of us. Meanwhile, we’re hoping that you can rest quietly here, and that no one disturbs you for a good million years or so. It’ll be a while before mankind uses up this place, so sleep well, buddy. It should be peaceful.”

  I wasn’t the only one looking over my shoulder the whole time, wondering what was next. I turned away during Jim’s remarks, but at the same time I was checking to see if we were being watched. I was wondering when Brandon would turn up next. I was wondering when the rover was going to come over the lip of the crater, when Brandon was going to try to take out the whole bunch of us, spraying us with Taser fire. We stood in the great waste of the planet Mars, uncertain and fearful, and the easiest thing would have been to load back into the Excelsior, assemble the Earth Return Vehicle, and declare an emergency. And yet I just wasn’t ready to give up.

  When Arnie and Laurie headed back to the greenhouse, the four of us who remained had a bit of a chat. To try to decide a course of action. The Mars mission, you see, had begun to acquire a certain inalienable organizational structure. According to its own interests. Arnie and Laurie controlled the food. Abu and Steve were in charge of the energy. Jim and I were in charge of infrastructure and the delivery of services. (That meant construction, education, political confederation, and policing.)

  The four of us, from power and infrastructure, stood for a minute in the dusk until the sun dipped away and we walked back toward our rovers. It was Abu who opened the subject, the subject we all knew we would have to address. I suppose we were putting it off.

  “How should we go about dealing with him?”

  “I think we ought to talk to NASA about it, even if we can’t trust them. Let’s see if they give away anything we need to know,” I said.

  “And when they don’t give us anything?”

  “We fabricate some unlikely plan of attack, leak it to them, see if it gets back to him.”

  Jim nodded solemnly. Though it was clear that he was thinking about something else entirely. And Steve, still ghostly, passive, was taciturn too. If it was going to be the drugged-up guy with his arm in the sling who did all the talking, the outcome was liable to be uncertain.

  And that reminds me. I forgot to say that Arnie managed to reattach two of my fingers! I didn’t properly re-create the scene after I managed to cross the hold and swing shut the air lock behind Brandon. I didn’t manage to re-create the moment when Jim finally stumbled down the ladder and into the cargo bay, to see blood everywhere and his shipmates laid out on the floor of the hold. The first thing he did was to attempt to revive José, and I can’t blame him for that. There was a lot of hopeless beating on José’s chest.

  When it was clear that CPR was not going to work, we placed a tarp over the body in the cargo hold and I showed Jim my hand, I held up my hand, and I asked—if he had time—if he would help me look around the cargo hold. The thumb was easy to find because it was right there on the floor, not far from one of the tires of the ultralight aircraft. And after we turned up the thumb, we worked a little harder for the index finger, which had apparently skidded far across the cargo bay, because it was over by the trash-compacting area of the cargo hold. But what of my middle finger? Kids, we looked high and low, we looked under things and over things, we looked in places where a finger could not have been. And we simply couldn’t come up with the middle finger. I suppose I was in shock from the blood loss, and I would have wandered around looking for my finger indefinitely if Jim hadn’t put a stop to the looking. The only line of speculation that seemed plausible was that the middle finger had somehow left the Excelsior with Brandon. Maybe Brandon had plucked it up from the floor, oozing slightly, and put it into his front pocket. As a little prize that he would be able to put on a necklace of his own manufacture and wear later during his reign of blood.

  After all, at the present temperature, the finger would keep for a very long time on the Martian surface. (We were intending to do some experiments to answer this very question, in fact. Since there were no or few microbes on the sterile surface of the planet, it followed that the whole planet was a sort of refrigerator. It would be hard to get meat and vegetable products to Mars, but once you got them here, they’d keep forever.)

  In the morning, when the sun came up, after I had another injection, Jim drove me over to see Arnie. I had the thumb and the index finger in a small plastic bag on ice. Not that we needed it. And my hand was wrapped in a great bandage that had severely depleted our stock of gauze on the Excelsior. The Martian dawn was just breaking as we pushed through the air lock into the greenhouse to wake the others. I felt a strange uncertainty about this trip, as if our bad news was so bad that it made the impoliteness of waking Laurie and Arnie even worse. But they were making coffee.

  Jim said, “We’re going to need some advanced medicine.”

  After a suitable pause he launched into the explanation. I could see Laurie and Arnie pass through various stages of disbelief. I could see the shimmering of Planetary Exile Syndrome in them, in which they did not want to believe. I could feel the heavy metals of Brandon’s rampage seep into the groundwater of the room. When no one quite knew what to suggest, Jim wordlessly laid the plastic bag down on the table in the greenhouse. The club of gauze at the end of my arm hadn’t even really registered for Arnie.

  I said, “Do you think you have enough tools here to do a bit of reattachment?”

  “Oh, damn it,” Arnie said. “Damn it
to hell. What the hell?”

  “That’s the least of it,” Jim said, “but we can’t really afford to have Jed out of action, can we? I mean, a man’s got to have a thumb. He won’t even be able to do the dishes without that thumb.”

  As Arnie was examining the fingers in the bag, and (subsequently) unrolling my gauze club, he asked what I was doing for pain relief, and I hate to say it but I was completely high that day, as well as in the days afterward. I was flying on some synthetic opiate that NASA had sent along with us, and the stars in the Martian sky at dawn, and the moons, they all looked fabulous to me, like a backdrop that some filmmaker had gussied up to impress the crowds at the late show on Saturday night. The stars seemed like little neurons in my skull, in the vastness of my own intelligence. I told Arnie what I was on and how much, and he nodded approvingly, said something hackneyed about staying ahead of the pain curve. And then, in the course of his preliminary examination, he managed to recognize the numerical discrepancy between the number of fingers in the bag and the number of stumps on my hand.

  “Aren’t you short a digit here?” he said.

  “Couldn’t find the other one,” I said.

  “It’s always something,” Arnie offered.

  For those who are curious: synthetic opiates are not enough for microsurgery. And even if microsurgery, with the aid of nanotechnology, is routine back where you are, and even if Arnie had done a few reattachments in his past, doing it on Mars, on a table, in a greenhouse, with pretty rudimentary surgical equipment, when you’re waiting for a madman to appear to hack you to death again, and again, and again, well, it makes for a difficult surgery. They had to hold me down. The three of them. They strapped me down with cargo belts like I was a raving lunatic. Laurie was holding my arm, and Jim was holding my head, and I was scared. I have been scared on this mission before, there have been many opportunities, and I am not the most courageous man on the mission, and I never will be. I am here to be organized, detail oriented, a good communicator, a utility infielder who can do a lot of things reasonably well. I know that I felt the little vascular connections being reattached, I felt every one of them, I don’t care what they say about local anesthetic obliterating the feelings. I felt the venous and arterial material transiting through me, felt the torn muscles back where they belonged, and the hours it took seemed doubly or triply agonizing. And I wet myself, and I wept bitterly and begged for Arnie to be through long before he was, and when it was done, and Jim hauled me up onto my feet, Arnie said, “Jed, I’d like to promise you that those fingers are going to stay on there, but I can’t promise you anything of the sort. While I doubt they will become gangrenous, because we just haven’t seen much evidence of that sort of thing here on Mars, you might have such bad circulation in there that they have to be taken off again. Keep the sutures clean, use soap and water, let me know if you have reduced sensation as the days go forward.”

  “Well, Arnie,” I said, “I’m just grateful to you,” and then my knees buckled again.

  Under the circumstances, I did a pretty good job at the funeral. And for this I can only thank drugs. My problem with these things, and I’m ashamed to say I have had occasion to sample many of the available opiates, is that you just can’t think straight in the same way. This was apparently as true on Mars as on Earth. I was moved to tears by the surgery because there’s a desolation that goes with having had a bunch of your fingers lopped off and then sewn back on by a gardener on a dusty desert planet, when you are still a year or more from making it home, and your new friend has just been slaughtered, and your lover will no longer recognize that you are together; I guess there were many reasons to be moved to tears.

  But I had even more to consider when I got back to the Excelsior after the funeral, when I was wide awake with opiate insomnia, watching Jim Rose sleep. Kids, it was about time that someone sat down and began to describe the systematic decompensation of the emotional lives of everyone on Mars. It was time that someone made an attempt to study this decompensation, in an effort to describe it for the historical literature, and perhaps, in this way, to shed light on what we could next expect from Brandon. And from ourselves.

  It seemed to me that there were only two possibilities. The first possibility was that the long-term separation from Earth did in fact engender something along the lines of interplanetary disinhibitory disorder, in an aggravated or acute form, such that people just couldn’t seem to keep their emotions in check. Do you need concrete examples? First, there was my relentless and humiliating neediness around Jim Rose. Evidently my homosexual romantic instincts were just not as graceful as my heterosexual instincts. I didn’t know how to stop wanting his attention; I didn’t know how to stop feeling that even his really peculiar habits, like the strange grunting thing he did while reading, were somehow endearing or even handsome. I didn’t know how to stop feeling flushed and warm inside when he was nearby. And I didn’t know how to stop pushing him on this, even though there had been moments recently when I actually worried that he was perhaps capable of battery.

  This was the first example. A mostly normal heterosexual man becomes a wanton and pandering lothario of gay love. Then there was Debbie Quartz, of whom enough has been said. And Steve Watanabe, whose free fall into muteness already seemed to me to foretell dread things ahead. Jim Rose, who had started the mission as an upbeat high school quarterback of a guy and who now had more in common with Moses or Saint Jerome. And then there was the weird saccharine domesticity of Laurie and Arnie, though both were parents back home, and in Arnie’s case, happily married (or so it was said). Now, if they’d had a chance, they would have found a Martian golden retriever with which to adorn their playhouse. Of Abu, we had no example of eccentricity yet, except sculpture, but perhaps time would tell. He was just a very reliable person. And Brandon had evidently become quite insane.

  Interplanetary disinhibitory disorder, that was one possibility of what we were seeing. The other possibility, and I admit that completely high on pain medication as I was, it was possible this was more a figment of my rather delusional mind, was that Brandon had already been infected with M. thanatobacillus. What I intended to research online, while I had the strength and was awake enough, was whether there was any kind of comparable bacterial infection that I could find from the medical literature on Earth that would give me an idea of what we were going to experience in the course of infection. Ordinarily, on Earth, with your new bacterial infections, when they were first making their way through the general population, there was a tendency for the infections to be fatal, and spectacularly so. Think of necrotizing fasciitis. Or hantavirus, which the overdevelopment of the desert cities had brought into the megalopolis. These bugs made you bleed everywhere and die within hours, begging for mercy.

  M. thanatobacillus, on the other hand, may have had a preliminary effect that was only apparent in the character of the afflicted individual. Like rabies. I remember hiking in the Smoky Mountains with my daughter not too many years ago, when, at the summit of the mountain, we saw the most adorable skunk wandering around. Not the least bit afraid of us! Willing to walk right up to us! My daughter just adored skunks, and it was she who saw it first. She was getting ready to feed the rodent when I let out one of those parental howls that is intended to require immediate attention. No doubt the skunk was hydrophobic. It is possible that M. thanatobacillus has just this kind of a trajectory, wherein there are first character effects, and then only later do the somatic aspects of the infection begin to appear, the part of the disease where you disassemble. There was a sort of a hybrid of Marburg and dengue fever that the United States stockpiled during the Central Asian police actions a decade or so ago, and which were used in a very hushed-up way against rebel groups in the Caucasus region. I may have known more about this than I can say right now, and it’s possible that this hemorrhagic hybrid, which has a long acronym of a name that I can’t put my finger on right now, is a good model for the initial infection cycle of M. thanatobacillus. We fou
nd hardened warlords from the rebel groups wandering in the mountains, carrying daisies and singing to themselves. It was not difficult to neutralize these combatants, and that was before the onset of somatic symptoms.

  Now that I was thinking about it, there may have been a third explanatory possibility, besides the two I’ve mentioned; maybe it was not the case that Brandon had interplanetary disinhibitory disorder; maybe it was not the case that he suffered the effects of his exposure to M. thanatobacillus, assuming José was right and such a bacterium even existed farther down in the Martian geological strata.

  Maybe José got killed so that he’d keep his mouth shut.

  March 12, 2026

  To: The entire Martian Community

  From: Jim Rose

  Re: A Survey of Martian Economics

  Be it known, fellow Martians, that the time has come for choosing! For every new civilization, no matter how fragile, no matter how young, how untimely birthed from the womb of the mother planet, there comes the moment in which this newly birthed society must determine for itself the specifics of its ideology. Fellow Martians, it is nearly six months now since first we set out on our long journey. How well we know the reasons and motives that first launched us into the milky oblivion of the innumerable stars! We know these reasons and motives because they were so often bandied about in the press and on television and across the web of our birth culture. We know the ideals to which the birth culture aspired, and we know the darker ways in which its needs oppress us! Fellow Martians, we know the mother planet is an angry and capricious mistress! We know that even at this distance she would command our every step, know every sentence that we utter, circumscribe every afternoon of the Martian year we are intended to spend here! And for what? For profit, fellow Martians, all for profit!

  When they see Mars, as they do through the cameras that we have installed for them, or through the reports that we write down for them, or from the microphones that are even affixed to the jumpsuits we are wearing at this very moment, they do so through terms and according to multinational ideologies that were constructed and designed for that world. They preach freedom while requiring servitude, fellow Martians! They preach sacrifice and selflessness while underwriting the mission with geological riches and the avarice such a thing entails. They preach tolerance while practicing war, and then they command our allegiance!