The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  “What we would like to express to you, Lieutenant Watanabe, is how honored we were to be trusted in this way by your wife and son, and how honored we are to tell you that we believe your son’s recovery will be complete. We would also like to remind you that you serve on the Mars mission as a representative of the government of this country, and by special appointment to the executive branch. For these reasons, we believe you are likely to find, when looking into your heart, when evaluating your moral chemistry, that you have a debt to us, as regards your mission, a debt that comes into sharper focus when you consider how we were able to help your son and your family as a whole.

  “Therefore, Lieutenant Watanabe, we would ask that by 0500 hours, Martian time, tomorrow morning, you relocate to the Valles Marineris site, where you will find Captain Lepper, and we would ask you to begin harvesting the silicon dioxide with Captain Lepper, according to directives made clear to the science officers on the Mars mission, at which point you will be given directions on how to procure bacterial samples from the Chryse region. This information as regards the bacterial samples, we would like to add, is completely secure and should not even be discussed with Captain Lepper in any detail. You are tasked with different objectives. I should stress, however, that at no time will you need to be performing the complicated experimental hybridization of the microprocessors with the bacteria. This very dangerous task—essentially the creation of a new cybernetic life-form—will be accomplished back here on Earth. At the conclusion of this mining and harvesting operation, we would offer you a trip home on an accelerated schedule. With fewer colleagues, the two of you will find your trip back will be faster and smoother, and we will make the needed propellant available to you.

  “Let us know your feelings and your plans, Lieutenant Watanabe. Please make them known to me personally through secure channels. I will, naturally, be conveying the information to the appropriate parties. Over.”

  When the transmission was complete, I looked back at Steve Watanabe, and he was, again, drying off some non-cybernetic tear duct effluent. It seemed, in fact, that he was in some human torment that I could scarcely understand, especially since I was part of the herd of intractable Martians, those who had fallen away from the economics and the space race dimensions of the mission.

  “What does this have to do with Abu?” I said, when I had recovered enough.

  Steve said, hotly, “I can’t believe you can even ask me that.”

  “When did this arrive?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Let me see if I understand the nuances. You’re saying that you tried to eliminate Abu because he knew about the pressure that was being exerted on you by the higher-ups at NASA? And because he might have seen the video and might be aware of the M. thanatobacillus microbe, and this alleged silicon dioxide mining? You needed to silence him?”

  “No,” Steve said, “that’s not what I’m saying. I can’t believe you’d… What I’m saying is…” But the enormity of his malfeasance was now out in the open. It was as if some drapery that had once concealed the Geronimo had been lifted from it, and we were seeing the contents of the capsule in their true light for the first time. “… it had to do with his sculptures.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “… because of the sculptures! Because of the sculptures! What do you want me to say? Jed, I went out and I saw the sculptures, and I saw how Abu was making something of his time here, and I’d made nothing of my time here. Do you know what brought me out here? Do you know what it was? It was that stuff I read as a kid. All the early rocketeers, those guys out in the backyards and in the flatlands of the desert, lighting off their homemade rockets and watching them soar into the firmament. I could never do that, because I was never smart that way. That dream of theirs, Goddard and those guys, was what kept me awake at night. That, and the fact that rocketry was a bunch of failures interrupted by the occasional improbable success. That was something I thought—and maybe I was just ridiculously vain here or something—but I thought it was something I could help with. All the failures on the way to Mars, the fact that Mars itself is a failure of planning built upon a failure of vision, in which there is wreckage and phenomenal waste at every turn, Jed, I really thought that I could be one of the people who made a difference! And what did I give up to make a difference? Look, reflect back on all the early thinkers about the planets; you have what’s his name, the guy who was covered with boils and scars and abandoned by his family, Kepler, right? His wife dies and leaves him with the kids, and he is chased from town to town until he dies of hunger somewhere trying to find food for his kids, or there’s Tycho Brahe, missing part of his nose. The guy actually wore a metal nose, and that was in, like, 1560 or something. Galileo died under house arrest after the Vatican hounded him for years. Do I have to go on? Do I have to talk about all the Mars missions? The Soviets lost five Mars orbiters between 1960 and 1962! Five of them. They didn’t get out of Earth’s atmosphere or their communications failed or they had badly designed rockets! The same for the majority of the American missions in the next ten years. Failed to achieve orbit or crashed on Mars. In 1971, the Soviets had an orbiting satellite broadcast back for eighteen seconds! Then more failures! In 1973, the Mars 7 from the Soviet Union missed the planet! Where is it now? Fifty years later? Near Alpha Centauri, maybe? Then there were the two Phobos missions, both failures, the first Mars observer, which failed in Mars orbit. The Nozomi from Japan never lifted off properly. You want more? The Polar Lander was supposed to harvest water ice, but crashed, and I saw pieces of it on the radar recently; the Deep Space probe went too deep into space; in 2010, Headstrong, the chimpanzee, went insane from the stress of the three-month interplanetary journey, despite an endless supply of bananas, and electrocuted himself. The Greenlander terraforming lab struck Deimos and shattered, right? The Arcadia 1 explorer unit somehow dismantled itself upon achieving a smooth landing. Jed, you get the idea.

  “Space travel is littered with the flameouts, with the outcasts, and I decided I was one of them. I decided I wanted to contribute to space travel the way these people did, and I left behind my wife and son to do it. I sat them down and I said I had to do this, I had to come to Mars, because what we needed to accomplish on Mars was more important than any one person. And I did believe I was going to come back. But then somewhere along the way, after Debbie died, I started to be privy to all the communications from the home planet, because I assumed some of Debbie’s job description, and I started to realize that it was less likely that I was going to make it home. I started to realize that what I accomplished here meant nothing, nothing, Jed, and I’d been lied to, and that NASA would just as soon leave our bodies out on the desert floor as they would throw a party to celebrate a successful launch back in the Everglades. We were coming to Mars for strategic reasons, not for the science. And I’d made the decision to leave my family, to leave behind my son, terribly ill, and I had traveled all the way out here to live like an indigent, and I had this big horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, every day, seemed like, when I’d get up and look out the window at the red desert. I felt like something horrible was going to happen, and all I could bring myself to do was to drink the ethyl alcohol in the maintenance closet, the alcohol that I was supposed to be using to clean component parts of the reactor. I started drinking it a little bit at a time, and I started swiping all kinds of meds from the first aid closet. That’s how it was over here on the Geronimo, Jed; worse than in some tent community back on Earth.

  “And the worst part was that none of it affected Abu at all. Abu had this ability to see the good in almost everything, and I was watching Abu melt down pieces of metal from the reactor and take this scrap out back, and some of the goddamned sculptures are glowing now; you knew that, right? You know that the sculptures shimmer a little bit? Like he took bits of spent fuel from the fuel assembly, and he put this graphite in the sculptures. Sure, it means that the sculptures are a little bit dangerous to us, fo
r ten thousand years or so, but he just didn’t care about any of that, because he already knew how much cosmic radiation he had picked up, not to mention the radon all over the place in every crater around us. Abu used everything that was waste, detritus; he picked it up and he started making these shapes and forms, and it was like Abu couldn’t put his hand down anywhere without leaving a mark that says: Here are traces of our dignity! Jed, I just couldn’t take it anymore. How can you withstand someone who sees the good in everything? Who never admits to a moment of envy or irritation? And when he came at me asking if he could start attaching the sculptures to the power station, hook the sculptures up to the reactor and the living quarters, which was still only half built out, so that our outsider art-tent community was sprawling into the desert, spreading joy, good cheer, human aspiration everywhere, that’s when I couldn’t take it anymore.… I just snapped.”

  Steve folded over, head in hands, as his monologue reached its heartbreaking conclusion. He fell against the wall of the cargo hold, turning his face from men, namely from me and Arnie, who had appeared on the scene just then. In the pall of the Geronimo, I couldn’t bring myself to recount the whole story to Arnie. Observing a modest silence, I showed him where Abu’s slumbering form was stretched out on the pallet. While the official examination began, I found the parts of my jumpsuit that I’d stripped away at the door, and I headed out back. For a little walk through the sculpture garden. Given what Steve had said, I figured there wasn’t much chance of my harvesting any pain medication from the first aid kit of the Geronimo. Not yet. Although I was doing the kind of calculations that you do with such things: Well, if he took this much, for this many days, and with a three-year supply, according to the manual, then how much could remain…

  I happened on the sculptures the way you crest a sand dune and find yourself by the sea, which is to say with anticipation and wonder. The sculptures dotted a half acre of land behind the reactor, and it wasn’t that they resembled the “primitive” art that you found on Earth, so much as they seemed to contain tribal representations of Martians, all fashioned, as Steve said, from metal detritus and silicone found around the site. Abu had used some of the parachute from the landing of the Geronimo, which looked almost like a tattered shroud. The Martians were cloaked in that cloth, and the steady Martian winds blew these creations, luffing and sighing, as if they were sailing vessels carrying Martian brigands. At the far end, where Abu had begun staining the gunmetal gray of the available metals with the reddish gray of Martian soil, so that his recent works looked like the volcanic rock outcroppings around us, he had also inlaid a brace of video monitors from back in the power station, and on these he was running loops of NASA footage of the planet Mars, solar powered. There wasn’t an Earth to be found anywhere in this dolmen circle of his works, just the totemic forms, and the representations of Mars, and the sun; kids, remember that Mars too always went around the sun, and the moons went around Mars, and in that reliable orbiting, Abu’s sculptural installation was much in the style of early-twenty-first-century installation art. But it was also very much connected back to the ancient stonework of the Druidic peoples of Europe. Or at least that would be my art critical take on the whole thing, that it was about what was new and what was old, and so it was something that was meant to be left behind. I spent a while out back considering the sculptures, while the sun was at its highest, and I could see how the shadows were part of the work. The shadows completed the pieces, making transepts and buttresses, implying outstretched limbs. When I had established that one viewing was not enough, I trudged around the power station and back into the Geronimo, vowing to return.

  Arnie was busy washing his hands with some water that was probably not at all what we might have referred to, on the home planet, as potable.

  “Watanabe?” I asked.

  Arnie came up short. Looked at me quizzically.

  “I thought he was with you.”

  “I thought he was with you.”

  “Did you have a look in the power station? Were you in there?”

  I suspected Steve Watanabe was not in the power station. I suspected the forklift that they used for transporting the fuel assemblies and so forth would be gone. I suspected that his decision had been arrived at quickly. By necessity.

  “What do you make of Abu?” I asked Arnie.

  “Blunt force trauma. He’ll either come out of it or he won’t. If he’s in a coma, you know what to do. He’s bleeding in the back of the head. Probably has cranial pressure, all of that.”

  Arnie held the rag with which he was drying his hands for a moment and looked at the scrap of warps and wooves, as if it had just been lifted from the face of our lost comrade.

  “We’re in trouble here,” he said.

  I said, “Hey, while we’re on the subject, I’m having a really hard time sleeping. You know, aches in the spots where the fingers were reattached and phantom limb syndrome from the missing finger; do you think you could—”

  For the record, I did have some second thoughts, buried inside, second thoughts about the shape that life on Mars had taken, with its darkness and its callousness. There was a piquancy to Abu’s sculptures, as I had seen them, and it was matched by an absolute lack of compassion everywhere else on the planet. And I was worst of all. I wanted to do better, but I didn’t seem able to do better. Arnie didn’t give my request a second thought. He had morphine syringes on his person. Whether he knew the purpose of my request or not, he didn’t say. At that point I wouldn’t have cared either way.

  March 28, 2026

  The most prized of Martian sights, if we were to speak of this neglected planet in the terms reserved for tourist attractions, are the traces of unmanned missions past.

  The early Mars exploratory missions were like the old masters to us now. Their gear had long since been reduced to buckets of eroded junk. And yet every time we went out into the field, on whatever experiment or mapping initiative, we looked for their tracks. As if seeing some glorified wheelbarrow that the USA or the European Union had sent up would make us less homesick.

  It was Laurie Corelli who used to joke about the infamous Mars explorer called Saratoga, which like so many unmanned missions to Mars had gone dark shortly after landing. From the Saratoga, NASA got a few shots of the polar landscape, where the Saratoga was intended to set up shop, and these shots were of gaseous vapors burning off around the rover, as if it were standing in the midst of some heavenly Finnish spa. Immediately thereafter, the Saratoga fell into silence. Another $15 or $20 billion of taxpayer money flushed into the sewage field of aeronautic history. The interesting twist in the tale of the Saratoga, however, was that there had been two occasions, two days later, when the rover actually checked back in. These transmissions broke through the radio silence and the background radiation—for fifteen or twenty seconds. In each circumstance, the rover was far from where it had been projected to be, as if it had somehow developed a will of its own on Mars and was well on its way to a location of its choosing. After these brief, appealing moments of contact, the Saratoga slipped out of range for good. In subsequent years, NASA would occasionally (and only internally) claim to have seen something that might or might not have been a transmission from the Saratoga, or perhaps even a still photo of its dusty chassis. But there was a fair amount of space junk on the planet’s surface now, so who knew really?

  It was a software glitch, no doubt, that caused the malfunctioning of the navigational controls on the Saratoga. But doubters believed something else entirely. Laurie Corelli was eager to put forward the notion that the craft had not malfunctioned, or not in the way that NASA believed. The Saratoga, according to Laurie, exhibited what we on Mars now referred to as the problem of the very large computing capacity. Some of our own NASA evaluative machinery had become so large in terms of numbers of microprocessors and amount of raw computing power that this machinery exhibited strange signs of reflexivity, or even primitive stages of consciousness. I could point you in the direc
tion of various theorists of artificial intelligence for more illumination on this subject.

  However, anyone on Earth might tell you the same, that the more complicated machines got, the more they came to resemble people. On the watery planet, people could send their machines back to the techno-recycling authorities. On Mars, the problem of the very large computing capacity was more worrisome. Jim said, for example, that the ultralight would occasionally refuse to land. As if it simply wanted to keep flying. Similarly, the small modular robots that we sent down into various crevices and canyons on Mars would sometimes send back random gibberish to us and then just continue wandering off.

  Laurie said, articulating one of the originary myths of the planet Mars in 2026, that the Saratoga had become wild and that we would, sooner or later, happen upon it, in some cave, like a Japanese soldier after WWII. The Saratoga, Laurie argued, was in the wilderness, trying not to be reprogrammed by Houston and waiting to debrief us, or other friendly representatives of planet Earth, with details of all that it had mapped.