The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  Did I not know this fountaining was permitted by the program? Somehow I had never considered the ephemeral perfection of lactating before. Each of the gryphon’s three nipples spumed steadily, and I stood, in my modified lumberjack outfit, as the gryphon milked herself into my mouth. I was so high that I stopped to ponder, in the interval while I waited for the animation to reset again from 40 million miles away (we had moved out of alignment with you all), whether the gryphon milk could actually help me with my malnourishment problem. The milk was a torrent now, across my face, and I drank deeply of it, and I performed the keystrokes that would make my space arm stand up like a beacon of interplanetary comity, and then the gryphon, making some kind of horrendous mewling sound made more forbidding because of signal feedback, parted the lips of her labia and swallowed first my head and then the entirety of me. I disappeared inside.

  Somewhere in the midst of this rebirthing ritual, I must have nodded off. The gryphon no doubt had her way with me, enfolding me and emulsifying me in her amorous sluices and jellies, and whether I had obliged to return the favor with my oversized animated space arm was unknown to me. I woke and it was morning, and there was an incoming message on the walkie-talkie from Steve Watanabe. I could hear the static of the radio signal. These days the walkie-talkie buzzed at me with greater and greater infrequency, as the Martians disappeared into their solitary desperations.

  I shook off the morphine static from the night before and picked up the handset. Steve greeted me with his usual reserve.

  “You might want to come over.”

  “What’s up?”

  “It’s about Abu. He wasn’t here when I woke. It was his shift, but he wasn’t here. I figured I’d go out back for a look.”

  That, he told me, was when he saw Abu outside. Half stripped of his Mars outer gear, rated for the two hundred degrees below. He walked me through the details again. The sculptures, the cold, the exposure. I told him I’d be over as soon as I could.

  “Is Jim anywhere around?”

  “Not back yet.”

  “I’m just thinking we might want to consider the possibility, you know, of foul play.”

  At this point, I cut the conversation short. I told Steve I was skeptical, and I rang off. After which I tried to contact Jim Rose, who, when gallivanting around the planet on his daily or nearly daily reconnaissance missions, was often lazy about telecommunications equipment. And then with a leftover sense of responsibility, I checked the radar map on the command console to see what Brandon was up to. He had moved farther into the canyon, as if what he was looking for was buried away in the layers of dust and sediment. As if he were burrowing into the origins of the canyon, in the east. I went and suited up.

  March 27, 2026

  When I arrived at the Geronimo and found Steve Watanabe out front in a space suit that was nothing like the pocked rags the rest of us were wearing, a space suit mostly unused, he looked not quite as depressed as his reputation. Agitated would have better described it. Confused affect, marked by the presentation of deceit, as they are now saying in the NASA internal literature, or exhibiting symptoms of interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome. I would have also said “anxious” or “conspiratorial.” Steve was sweating, I believe. His visor was fogged up.

  “He’s strapped into his bed downstairs,” he said.

  Meaning Abu Jmil, first officer, sculptor, engineer of nuclear power. What was left of him. We went around to the cargo entrance and closed the squeaky hatch door behind us. There was a pall to the Geronimo. I could never understand how people could feel productive in low light. Abu, as advertised, was stretched out on one of the pallets in the cargo hold. Covered with a blanket.

  “How did you get him home?”

  “He was still able to walk at that point,” Steve said. “He was partially conscious. His legs did a little bit of work. Then he blacked out completely—once we got back here.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me to arm myself that morning. In truth, it never occurred to me to arm myself, despite my military training. I left that to tougher people, like Abu. Pulling off my gloves and my helmet, and setting them down on the floor, I got out the radiophone I kept on my person and radioed over to the Pequod. Bad reception. All the while Steve gaped at me, as though he just didn’t know what to do with himself.

  “Arnie? Laurie? It’s Jed calling.”

  Arnold Gilmore’s sleepy voice on the squawk box, compressed, tinny.

  “Kind of early, isn’t it?”

  “Got a situation,” I said.

  “What kind of a situation?”

  “Steve tell you about Abu?”

  He sounded confused. “What about him?”

  “Says he found him out back of the power station, with his sculptures, and that Abu spent the night out there. In the permafrost. And, well, he says that Abu took off most of his outerwear. Parts of his skin were even exposed.”

  “Repeat, please?” Laurie, who must have been there in the room with him, could be heard in the background. To her, Arnie mumbled, “Hang on, there’s something wrong with Abu.”

  I took up the story: “Steve says that Abu was out all night working on his sculpture and that he was exposed to the low temps overnight, and Steve further observes that Abu must have elected to remove his gear.”

  “Doubtful,” said Arnie, improvising. “Unless he was set on a painful death.”

  “Could you make a house call?”

  “As soon as I can get there.”

  I holstered the communications device. Once the call to Arnie was effected, I found myself standing in a half-lit cargo bay with a very jittery young man who clearly had something on his mind. Steve shifted himself from leg to leg so violently that even in his lightweight extraterrestrial Mars surface exploration jumpsuit he was some kind of kundalini adept. And perhaps I haven’t adequately described Steve Watanabe, the George Harrison of the Mars mission, and so let me present to you, those of you who haven’t seen the portrait photo that NASA took of him in his space suit (one gloved palm on the top of his helmet as it sat imposingly on a table), nor read the press releases, nor seen the feed: the actual Steve, which is to say the Martian Steve, was generally mute, some people would say downright chilly. Not given to a smile, nor to pleasantries that lasted longer than the minimum. During the training portion of our mission, we sometimes referred to Steve as the Department of Quantitative Analysis, because of his capacity to miss the human dimension, and also because he always thought through a problem from a number of practical angles before proceeding, immobilizing himself in the process.

  As I’ve mentioned, Steve has a son who had come down with an antibiotic-resistant infection just before we lifted off, and he spent quite a bit of the early portion of the trip very preoccupied with the health of this youngster. There must have been an afternoon before liftoff when Steve and his wife, Danielle, perhaps with the blessing of this eleven-year-old boy, thought through whether it would be a good thing for Steve to make his fateful journey, in a fateful black limo, to Cape Canaveral, before the final intake for liftoff. There must have been an afternoon when he and his wife tearfully arrived at a decision, with Steve, Department of Quantitative Analysis, drawing up some list of debits and credits. Worldwide fame, check. A lifetime of guilt, debit. Fantastic, unfathomable voyage, check. Shell-shocked, inconsolable wife, debit. The son, who Steve no doubt believed would improve, had been in and out of the hospital in the months since that day. Steve had been remarkably stoic, as far as I could tell, but it did seem that it wasn’t until he touched down on Mars that the enormity of the mission, the cost of it to him personally, hit home.

  He was on the short side, with longish dark hair that even before the Mars adventure flirted with regulation. And he had an odd white patch in the front that he liked to claim was owing to his having seen an incarnation of the Buddha in his attic as a boy. This delusional anecdote was a rare departure from Steve’s military humorlessness otherwise. Steve and Danielle lived in a ranch-style h
ouse just outside Tampa, not far from the Gulf of Mexico. Steve’s hobbies (everyone who filled out a personnel form at NASA had to list a hobby) included the construction of model planes and paint-by-numbers velvet paintings, which he bought at tag sales and painted all “wrong,” with “hilarious” results. These velvet pieces were really quite stunning, but as Steve himself had pointed out, it had been years. Simply watching output monitors on a nuclear reactor, occasionally using a forklift to take spent fuel assemblies out into a gully, and filling out reports for Houston, these things had stamped out any vestige of the velvet painter in Steve Watanabe.

  It must have made it that much harder to bunk with Abu Jmil, whose enthusiasm, and whose adaptive qualities, were the envy of the rest of the crew. Steve, in his quiet, understated way, and without ever seeming to do much but look like a public-relations brochure, was incredibly competitive and would stay up nights memorizing facts and figures that would make him the premier Mars mission astronaut, at least ahead of launch. Back during the selection process, he worked hard at besting a Mormon triathlete from Provo, UT, Norman Backus, who believed himself to be Steve’s close personal friend. On the other hand, they could test and retest the astronauts of the Mars mission until the proverbial cows came home. Not one of the testers, with their little three-dimensional computer interfaces with their multiple-choice questions about how we would deal with the ethics of biological warfare or hand-to-hand combat with alien life-forms, had ever been to Mars. They had not spent six or eight months with nine (or eight, or six) people, in cramped quarters, dealing with the imponderables that cannot be included in a manual. The testers had opinions. They would tell you that they were once trapped in the back of a shipping container on a pier in a port city in Lebanon, where they had been sequestered by thugs bent on using them for ransom. These kinds of stories were everywhere in the chain of command at NASA. But the testers didn’t understand Mars, and they didn’t understand the effects of planetary exile.

  “I think you have something to tell me,” I said to Steve, bearing in mind what I knew. “I don’t know what it is, but if you’re worried about having kept something from me, from us, you should unburden yourself, because we’re together in all of this, no matter what it is you’ve done. We’re inhabitants of Mars. You and I. We can solve our disagreements according to our own evolved legal standards.”

  Probably, it was a big deal for Steve Watanabe to decompensate in front of me. It must have been a betrayal of his most cherished values. Consider the facts. I wasn’t close to him particularly. I was quite a bit older. I was balding, skinny, missing some teeth, and I had come to take a dim view of the chain of command. I suppose I never expected the Department of Quantitative Analysis to be crying in front of me, nor did I expect him to tip ever so slightly forward, with his stifled, hiccupy sobs, bubbles of mucus ballooning from his squat, flattened nose, muttering that he didn’t know what had come over him, leaning toward me almost as if he intended to put his head on my shoulder; I felt in myself a strange compound of rectitude and sympathy and disgust, but before he could do it, touch me, some vestigial training lecture on the subject of military bearing surfaced in him, and he snapped himself into a more dignified posture. Then he invited me to follow him to the command console in the Geronimo.

  What he showed me next was a personal video from Vance Gibraltar, budgetary director of the Mars mission, from back in D.C. My feeling upon encountering Vance Gibraltar, on the occasions when I did—which was whenever there was a phalanx of photographers from lackluster tabloid web addresses in the area—was that I had just been irradiated, or that he had somehow managed to conduct an identity-theft-style assault on my perineum, from which region he had extracted medical records, the drug history of my parents, and my tax forms going back beyond the statute of limitations.

  Vance Gibraltar was the person you didn’t want contacting you on Mars. He called when NASA began to feel that the mission was slipping beyond their control. Too much was riding on the Mars mission. Of course, they were already disappointed with me, since I had long ago stopped sugarcoating my web posts, nor was I reading your replies, nor remembering to post responses to them. Having given up on me, and probably on most of the rest of us, Vance Gibraltar, it turned out, had sent a highly unusual for your eyes only message to Steve Watanabe, a scrambled, encrypted communication, and this, I came to learn, was one of a series of such communications, the culmination.

  Gibraltar’s fat, self-satisfied face appeared on the screen with the NASA seal behind him. He had his hands folded on a desk in front of him, as if addressing the nation as a whole—instead of one nervous young man in a poorly insulated tin shack on the edge of the wastes. “Lieutenant Watanabe,” began the bureaucrat, “I know I don’t need to tell you how sensitive this communication is, and how unfortunate it would be if its contents became known to some of your colleagues there. Let me begin again where we left off in our previous communication, by telling you that the Mars mission, from the perspective of the cabinet-level administration that created and financed it, is not an unqualified success. It is not a success from the point of view of science, nor from the point of view of our national objectives.

  “The communications we get from your people, when we get them at all, are largely unintelligible. The footage we are getting from our few cameras, the ones that your people have not disabled, is of inconsequential landscapes. Rock and dust. We have photographed better landscapes ourselves, and created better composites, with the unmanned explorers in the last thirty years. The only person we feel is still acting in the interest of this administration, namely Captain Lepper, has been so isolated and set upon by the rest of our employees that he has had no choice but to take drastic measures to defend his person.

  “Lieutenant Watanabe, in contacting you we believe that the time has come to insure some of our mission objectives. You do know, do you not, that among the principal objectives of the Mars mission is the testing of silicon dioxide for improved microprocessor design. We have already made clear the specifics of this hybrid microprocessor design, but to reiterate, it involves, essentially, a live information-carrying colony of bacteria, where the organisms will be able to amass into self-replicating and self-programming computing systems. It is these samples that Captain Lepper now possesses at the Valles Marineris site. While the microbial samples are willing to interact with the silicon dioxide to make microprocessors, according to principles of nanotechnology and QED, thus far the microprocessors are resistant to being used as designed. We urgently require the completion of these experiments, as the research is likely being duplicated by Sino-Indian industrialists, if in the limited theater of Earth. Because of our unqualified lead in the interplanetary space race, Lieutenant Watanabe, we are in a position to lap our competitors, if only these experiments can be completed. This, Lieutenant Watanabe, is the one area as regards twenty-first-century economics, where your home, the nation that brought you into prominence as an astronaut, still manages to hold a significant edge on its enemies.

  “It is our opinion that Captain Lepper requires your aid, and we have directed him to contact you. We believe he is not making the kind of progress with decanting the silicates that he was expected to make. Can we be any clearer on these matters? Can we persuade you of the seriousness of these experiments? We can tell you, meanwhile, in order to assure that you are attentive to this part of the present communication, Lieutenant Watanabe, that your son, despite the best efforts of exotic-disease specialists in the state of Florida, has been suffering with a relapsing and remitting version of one of the families of streptococcus that have been circulating equatorially, here on Earth. We understand, Lieutenant Watanabe, that your wife has brought your son into the quarantine facility at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Florida for treatment. Your wife is unwilling to have her son treated at any of the public hospitals. We have a videotaped message from her on the subject, which will be available to you at the successful conclusion of the
projects just mentioned.