The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  “You’re referring to M. thanatobacillus?”

  “Or its many Earth-Martian hybrids, presently under military construction.”

  “Should we leave now? While we are still strong enough?”

  “I’m an artificial intelligence. I can’t predict. But I will leave you with one last bit of advice that was programmed into me by Leslie McHugh, PhD, a scholar from Ithaca, NY, who was disappointed by the budgetary situation at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Dr. McHugh’s advice, which has never done me wrong in my lifetime, is: follow the money.”

  To which, after an awkward interval, Jim said:

  “Do you want to come back to the base camp?”

  Perhaps this was a human interrogative, one that could only have been generated by a primate life-form, by the cerebellum and attendant neural pathways, soma and axon. And yet this was the question that Jim felt after his encounter with the Saratoga. He felt a need for a security that we didn’t have available on Mars. Jim knew the answer to the question, but he asked it anyway. The Saratoga had its own journey. Its journey and his journey may have intersected, but only by coincidence.

  By the time he’d finished typing the question, by the time the last punctuation mark had been appointed at its conclusion, the retracting panel had slid across the punch pad on the Saratoga, and its metal arm had begun to fold away.

  March 31, 2026

  And then the day came, the return from the desert of the one prophet of the Martian colony, Captain Jim Rose. It was his third time back from one of his ultralight jaunts, but let us not quibble about details. As you know, those who go into the desert for wilderness and solitude return with news from God. Whatever that means to this particular sojourner. God could be a walrus with a happy open face and a striped rubber ball. God could be a praying mantis. God, however, is in the empty spaces, and the wandering supplicant brings back word of him, or her, or it. This is exactly what Jim Rose proposed to do, fresh from mystical transport and visions of the interstellar beyond. Jim Rose had now witnessed what there was to witness, the collision of what was fashioned from titanium, aluminum, and silicon chips, and what was fashioned from carbon, water, and mood-stabilizing medication, and the way in which, on the surface of this planet Mars, these two things brushed against each other as they began the arduous process of seeking to subjugate, all in pursuit of profit and a reliable return on investment for the larger hedge funds and international investors, especially those based in the Sino-Indian Free Enterprise Zone. Captain Jim Rose, who had now been drinking the unfrozen and not terribly healthful beverage that involved defrosting the regolith with a blowtorch, believed this not terribly healthful beverage amounted to a Martian sacrament. Its poisons were urgently necessary to us. Which is another way of saying he had nothing to lose, and in thinking thus, he was forgetting much. In believing that his trip into the wilderness was sacramental, he had forgotten almost all that there was to forget of his family life on the home planet. Perhaps, from another vantage point, forgetting was one of the most important jobs you could have on Mars. When you forgot your relations with people back home, you renewed and refreshed your potential as a Martian. And so, while Captain Jim Rose was, kids, attempting to land his ultralight Martian air transport craft in the crater behind the Excelsior, let us pause briefly to update you on Jim Rose’s kids, all of whom I have occasionally met at NASA functions.

  They are four. Four bright, interesting kids who have contacted me here periodically, asking how their father was doing, because their father was all but entirely estranged from them. Their father was busy asking his questions: What is man? Is man a being who lives on the planet Earth? And: If man does not live on planet Earth, what is he and what word shall we use to describe him? And: If man is something other, is the process of becoming-other one in which he begins to resemble the landscape where he resides? And: What kinds of change, whether mental or physical, will ultimately result from man becoming-other in this other place?

  The eldest of the boys (by minutes) was called Roy, and I’m cribbing here from his social-networking instant data feed: I like hovercrafting and breaking the land-speed record and any drug that you use an inhaler for and I like the idea of a bathysphere and I like the idea of a fully mechanized wolf fighting to the death with a regular blood-and-guts wolf, and one thing I don’t care too much about is finishing school. What I want to do is join the military anyway, unless they make me take the stud out of my tongue. I’m interested in meeting people who have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness. I am a redneck and I can fuck you up. In fact, this bio was from a social-networking site for people with diagnosed mental illnesses, so that portion of the profile was not so cavalier as it sounds. Roy was a good kid, who worked in a franchise restaurant where he’d graduated up to assistant manager. Roy, therefore, wore a plastic bow tie. His twin brother, Mason, was, about this time, occupying himself as a lighting designer for a brace of high school drama productions, including one that took actual dialogue from the Mars mission radio transmissions—the dialogue from early in our journey as digested and reconstituted by public-relations personnel in Houston—and set it as dramatic scenes. Mason, according to what I learned from his brothers and sister, seemed to have had intermittent relations with girls. He mostly stayed late at school working on theatricals. Since his father’s absence, he had night sweats and fear of enclosed spaces.

  Annie would be a classic middle child if there were a middle child in the Rose family. Annie expressed a profound interest in automobile racing from her earliest teens. She claimed that as soon as she was licensed she would start trying to qualify for the racing circuit. She wore her hair in a crew cut, and she had a boyfriend who was an evangelical skateboarding champion. Her politics were reactionary, and she had signed on to a church-based initiative in which she agreed to avoid the Devil’s Triangle—cigarettes, drink, and heavy petting—until she turned eighteen. The only music she liked was classic country.

  The youngest Rose child, also from the second marriage, was a luminous, zero-gravity specter of a lad called Eldon, who played war-simulation games day and night. Even though his father was on the Mars mission, Eldon was teased often at school for his pasty skin and his spiky hair, which he failed to lacquer down. His shirts were always buttoned all the way up to the neck. He wrote editorials for the school paper.

  I should not overlook Jim’s long-suffering second wife, Jessica. She had converted to the Methodist faith to be with him, and she had left behind a large, happy extended family in Maryland to follow Jim Rose’s dream of space. Did she and the kids (and stepkids) sit around at night praying for the safe passage home of their father?

  And so what of this guy who landed the ultralight on the thirty-first of March, after several solitary journeys into the outback of Mars? Was he affable and easy to know? He looked like Moses; he thought he was Moses, bringing the word back to the people. The mysterious connections between things, between the Sino-Indian hedge funds and the mining in the Valles Marineris, for example, were so in the forefront of his mind that there was little room for anything else. He felt fuzzy, and he felt distended with insight, and he didn’t know why. He didn’t know why he couldn’t think straight, though he had eaten little in three or four days. He’d had no tomato, nor any Martian heads of lettuce; he hadn’t even had one of those squeeze tubes of soy protein with vanilla flavoring. His vitamin deficiencies were aggravated, and that might have accounted for his fuzziness, for his leaving the key in the ultralight and the door open. Not even thinking to check. Forgetting briefly to put on his helmet, so that he was walking through the impossibly thin air. Something was wrong, but he was unsure what. He was unsure which of the various things that were wrong had made him feel this way. It was as though he were unselfed somehow, like he had left the self who was in charge back somewhere, in the canyon, or back on Earth.

  He left the hatch open too. The cargo hatch, and he climbed into the Excelsior, and he called my name. Or this
is my supposition. He called my name, and he looked around at the shit that was all over the place, the discarded wrappers from inedible space food. (I had eaten nothing but NASA chocolate for the last couple of days.) I had shut down a lot of the monitoring systems. I had shut down all of the radio transmission equipment that connected us to the home planet, which was, theoretically, the especial responsibility of the Excelsior, communication and command/control. The Excelsior was for all intents and purposes vacant.

  Because I had moved over to the Geronimo, where I had volunteered to look after Abu Jmil. This was exceedingly generous of me. What I was doing there instead was regrettable, but perhaps you can find sympathy in your heart. What I was doing was using up the rest of the supply of opiates that were in the first aid storage locker on the Geronimo. I was occasionally lucid enough to be certain that the reactor was still pumping megawatts out so that we could continue to have heat and oxygen in the Pequod and the greenhouse, and in the Geronimo. I was also fermenting some of my Martian moonshine. With Steve Watanabe missing, Jim absent, and with Abu still unresponsive, there wasn’t as much need for the Excelsior in the first place, except during the Earth return portion of the mission. The Geronimo and its attendant power station, however, were crucial now. As I sat on the floor of the cargo hold there, dosing myself with the syringes and talking to Abu, I found I couldn’t really rationalize what had become of me. My monologue was of rancor and self-pity, but its real purpose was to insure that Abu knew there were still friends around him, if only to keep his brain waves active. The substance of my complaints doesn’t need to be reproduced here. I also ran through a battery of old blues standards, and maybe some soul classics, in which I simulated the fancy parts. Somewhere in the midst of this the door was thrown open and Jim Rose appeared backlit, as if from a Western film.

  “Captain,” I said. “And are you returned victoriously from your mission?”

  He said nothing.

  “Why so quiet?”

  It would have been natural had he not wished to say much to the wastrel he found in the Geronimo. Not to mention the slumbering, nearly dispatched form of the Mars mission sculptor. But when he drew nearer, I got a better look. He wasn’t wearing headgear, as I’ve said, and his suit was torn, and his beard was covered with reddish dust, as was his face, likewise flecked with the kinds of burns that I associated with Martian frostbite. But that’s not what concerned me. What I saw, and I was not in my right mind and had not been in my right mind for some weeks, as indeed none of us had been, but I was nonetheless certain that there was something wrong with his eyes. Kids, if the eyes are the seat of the soul, or however that commonplace goes, then Jim’s soul had gone on extended leave. What his Martian eyes looked like now—merciless, devoid of what was human—curdled the very blood. For his eyes were black. I don’t mean the iris, nor the vacuity of the pupil, I mean around his eyes was black, as if something had gone inside and scorched him in some way, leaving only a raccoon-like ring around his eyes. And this was enough to drain the last of the old Jim Rose. He had leaked out; he had become some harrowing and menacing and dead thing, where once there had been, need I remind you, my lover.

  “Are you all right?” I said. “For godsakes, Jim, say something.”

  I had become afraid. I had been in some bad spots on the Mars mission. Maybe there had been a lot of times, such as when my fingers were hacked off by Brandon Lepper, when I’d been temporarily worried. But the professionals back on Earth had trained me well. True, I was never certain I would live out my term on the Mars mission, but even that didn’t frighten me. I was never affrighted on Mars, until now.

  He shook off his cloud, as best he could, and he attempted, thickly, to say something. Whatever had happened to him out there had begun to affect his speech centers, his fine motor skills. Whether he knew entirely what he was saying wasn’t clear to me either. There was a dull, plodding quality to his speech.

  “I’m not feeling very well, Jed.”

  “I can see that. What happened out there?”

  “A lot happened. I don’t know if I’m well enough to tell it.”

  He slumped onto the floor, barely sitting up, and I came near to him. And I looked into his dead eyes.

  “Do you want me to call Arnie?”

  “What happened to Abu?” he whispered.

  “Steve appears to have gone off to help Brandon, among other things. Apparently, NASA was communicating with him all this time. And Abu is… as you see. A casualty of greater historical forces.”

  A long, concerned exhalation, as if all the air left on the planet were expelled from the lungs of Jim Rose.

  “What is it?” I said. “Tell me how to help.”

  That was the moment in which the halting and uncertain tongue of the now afflicted Jim Rose rambled back through his adventures, much of it concerning the absolutely statistically improbable encounter with the explorer called the Saratoga. He kept coming back to the explorer. It was a thought that he couldn’t relinquish. He wanted to know if NASA could possibly have got in touch with the Saratoga, in order to send it against us, in order to scuttle our colonial ambitions. Except that, as he said, there was nothing misleading about the Saratoga. It had spoken frankly to him. And it had warned him about everything that was going on. Did that seem possible? he wanted to know. I confess that it was hard for me to believe any of this. I assumed that the story was a delusion of his illness, not a genuine happenstance that he was reporting to me from his time away. His impressions tumbled out helter-skelter, and I couldn’t always understand him, but I could hear, in the thickness of his incoherences, a fever to narrate, and so I let him talk for a while. Chief among the contradictions that he could not reconcile, especially in his condition, had to do with the possible military applications of the Mars mission, hinted at by the Saratoga. Were we, he wanted to know, supposed to be harvesting M. thanatobacillus, as he and I had long assumed we were? Or was there some other military application that had to do with the perfectable crystals of silicon dioxide out in the Valles Marineris, as told to Steve Watanabe? Or were these two reasons for the mission somehow linked up, like some chain of supercomputers, such that there was a biotechnical purpose to all of this, which, in cooperating, we were hastening? These questions were hard for him to articulate, as though he could no longer talk about the very issues that he himself had raised on Mars, as though, like the Moses he now resembled, he was destined not to participate in the Martian civilization he had brought about. It was after he had been talking in this way for a while that he admitted to having found abundant sources of water.

  “You what?”

  “It’s almost everywhere.”

  “And do you have some with you?”

  He rummaged through his pack, which lay beside him, forcing some zippers abraded with Martian grit, and produced a couple of bottles of it. There were also drums of the stuff in the hold of the ultralight.

  “It… vaporizes outside. But I think if we keep it—”

  “Inside. Right. Did you—”

  “I drank some.”

  “You drank some?”

  “I drank a lot.”

  “Jim, are you out of your mind?”

  “Someone had to do it.”

  “It might be radioactive, on top of everything else. Are you feeling sick? We should have boiled it first! Or we could have ionized it. It’s no wonder you’re feeling ill. I’m going to call Arnie.”

  He just needed to sleep, he said, and maybe something to eat, and yet despite how famished he was, he said, despite how beat up his body must have been, how frostbitten and irradiated and exhausted, he’d never felt more alive. The very cells of him had been lit up by the heavens, by the actual heavens, the almost infinite ocean of stars, not the ground on which we found ourselves. And it was at this moment that he did something so horrible that I don’t even know how to describe it. Upon getting to his feet he paced, shambled, from one side of the cargo hold to the other, and while teasing out some hard
-to-follow part of his story, he went over by where Abu lay, and gazing upon our Muslim sculptor, Jim just cupped his hand over Abu’s mouth and nose, pressed hard, and then, turning fully upon the slumbering man, he put a little muscle into it and held the breathing passageways closed. Until Abu, the sculptor, was no more.

  It was so studied in its casualness, this dispatch, that I didn’t really take in what he was doing at first. I couldn’t believe what was happening; I didn’t believe I was seeing it, which may have had to do with the opiates, with the amount of them flooding the moral center of my brain. How many times I have thought back on this moment since, and wondered how to interpret what took place onboard the Geronimo. Was the old Jim, the Jim I once desired, still in there somewhere, was it he who recognized immediately that we couldn’t carry Abu like that, given the shortage of resources? This old Jim understood mercy, and he knew that this sort of mercy was not permitted on the home planet. There were no laws governing what we could and couldn’t do on Mars. Pragmatic decisions were required here. They were within our power. But part of me believed it was Jim’s illness, whatever it was, that made the decision. Without feeling. The second of these hypotheses was the darker one, a theory that was hard to ignore under the circumstances, that Jim was no longer Jim.