The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  I said, “Do you want to move in here, into the reactor camp, with me?” Hoping that the thought would never occur to him. “We could go back to the Excelsior and bring some of your stuff over here. Make it a bit more habitable. Like a proper home.”

  Did I detect some kind of fiendish laugh? Was the new Jim capable of a fiendish laugh? It was perhaps some variant on the deceitful snorting that I had noticed in the old Captain Jim Rose. His reply was long in coming. And he stood up straighter, while pacing, as if to deliver it like a proper orator of old.

  “I’m going to Valles Marineris.”

  “You’re going—”

  “To find Brandon.”

  “And what do you propose to do when you get there?”

  No answer.

  “Will you, at least, leave some of the water behind so we can test it?”

  He nodded, but in heading for the door he offered little more. It was me who kept filling in the empty spots in the Mars mission now, with the pleasantries, the witticisms, the little things that are so easy to say and which, whether you believed in them or not, made the people around you feel a little better. The pleasantry was perhaps one of Earth’s greatest exports. The mild but generous ways that people lied to one another about their hopes and fears. If I had a longing, after the advent of Jim’s illness, his change of character, it was for just one stranger with whom I could venture a few harmless pleasantries.

  Afterward, I paid my respects to a dead man. I was getting used to the signs of mortality around me on Mars, planet of death. Abu had been one of the people I liked best on the Mars mission. A man noteworthy for grace and reasonableness. On Earth, he had smoked the occasional cigar, but not in a way that irritated anyone. He liked the blues. I drew the blanket up over his face. I mulled over attempting to pray facing in an easterly direction. Was there, strictly speaking, an east on Mars? I wanted to respect the traditions of a desert faith. In the end, I whispered to him, under the blanket, there in the cargo hold, but I don’t want to sully a good astronaut’s memory by going on and on. Some things, kids, are designed for the privacy of eternity.

  Next, when I’d made sure that Abu was covered and for the moment undisturbed, I hastened to the console of the Geronimo. It was a sign of my distress that I was about to contact the home planet. I’d been writing my diary regularly, true, except for those moments when my hands swam in front of my face from how high I was, but I had long since abandoned filing my diary with NASA since they had dismantled its web portal. As I said, I’d disconnected all the communications equipment in the Excelsior, where most of the text was stored in the first place. But there was still enough backup equipment on the Geronimo for me to send distress messages to Earth.

  On duty, at NASA headquarters, was a young woman named Nora. She appeared to me like a fuzzy passport photo, thirty-nine minutes delayed. I thought I could make out some kind of bow in her hair. Unless that was part of her headset. Otherwise she was got up in the de rigueur navy blue warm-up suit that passed, at NASA, for cutting-edge fashion. Nora was so young. I had aged in the course of my interplanetary travel, despite the blessings of general relativity, which asserted that I should age more slowly. I introduced myself to Nora Huston, by videoconference. She replied, as if coming out of suspended animation, “Colonel Richards, hello, we know who you are down here.”

  “I’ve been out of touch for a little while, I know. Forgive me. Things have just been busy. But I think that there are a few developments here you need to know about.”

  In the next minutes of waiting I had ample time to scan her face for signs of judgment. It was hard to see any. She had been selected precisely for her earnestness, for her inability to appear conspiratorial. This was not to suggest that she was one of NASA’s spying lackeys, bent on reining us in and getting the mission back under control. It was just that they couldn’t help themselves—they recruited in order to fortify the chain of command.

  “Colonel Richards, we have almost everyone who’s still awake here—it’s about three in the morning—including the flight director, and we are ready to listen. Please feel free to give us a full briefing.”

  Was I about to bring Martian civilization to a grinding halt? The morality of what I was doing was imprecise, and I probably wasn’t in the state of mind where clear thinking was easy to come by. But the import of recent events was hard to ignore. If I slowed down, shook off a little of my nod, military training returned, if only for a few minutes.

  “I need to report a Code 14,” I said, “and I’m afraid it’s my cabinmate, Jim Rose. You all know that I have nothing but esteem for Jim Rose, having served with him as long as I have, and having known him for years before that. It is therefore the case that I am using this Code 14 designation advisedly. I know, ladies and gentlemen, what I’m telling you. But I have reason to believe that Captain Rose is no longer operating with his faculties intact.”

  Because he had been a singer of show tunes and country and western, because he had been a teller of bad jokes and an adherent of the pun, because he’d been good-natured and nervous at the same time, because he’d played video games with me, because he was worried about elections back home, because he didn’t understand how he was going to send his wife lingerie for their anniversary from this great distance, because he’d been my lover, and because I knew that even if he couldn’t say it, he had loved me, he had reached for me when the loneliness and isolation got too bad, because he once needed companionship, I knew he was not himself.

  “On what basis, specifically, do you alert us to this Code 14, Colonel Richards?”

  “On the basis that Jim leaned down and squeezed the last bit of life out of Abu Jmil this afternoon. Abu had been suffering from hypothermia, we think.… I don’t know. That’s another story. Anyway, Jim came back from being out in the desert.”

  “Can you tell us where Captain Rose had been?”

  “He was out surveying various areas here by Nanedi Vallis,” I improvised, without really being sure if this was true at all. “The runoff patterns there are really quite extraordinary, and Jim was keen to see them. There’s the question of a source for the Nanedi Vallis riverbed, and we had it on the logbooks for some time that we were going to fly over there and have a look.”

  I removed myself from the camera while awaiting their reply.

  “And how would you characterize the condition of Captain Rose? If you could.”

  “I would characterize Captain Rose as in rather dire condition. He’s certainly not well. He seemed to me to be… not himself. The Jim Rose I have known in the course of our professional duties, I should say, would not take a life the way he did just this afternoon. On the other hand, we’ve been having trouble with outbreaks of violence among the crew, which is virtually the entirety of the Martian population.… First, there was Brandon and the situation with José. And then, well, it seems like what happened to Abu is that he was… Well, in each of these circumstances you could make the case that the astronaut whose actions are in question was suffering with some kind of interplanetary disinhibitory disorder, as you might call it, and this has bothered all of us to one degree or another. But Jim seemed…” Again, I just couldn’t seem to complete the sentence.

  “We are aware of the other situations and we thank you for corroborating what we know. And we are curious to learn whether there were any specific physiological changes in Captain Rose. Did you notice anything different?”

  I leaned in close to the camera, which really did resemble some sleepless eye, some all-seeing lens, and I alerted her thus:

  “There did seem something physically wrong with him, which was partly in the area of his eyes; he seemed bruised around the eyes, or contused, I don’t know the proper terminology, and then there was his dishevelment. He just isn’t looking after his appearance. And then I’d say he was full of a rather unusual amount of strength, like he was on some sort of adrenaline high. He was not himself. That was my impression. That he was physically changed in some smal
l degree, but also that he was unselfed. He wasn’t Jim Rose. And I would like to know what you expect me to do about it, since we are now down to a mere capsule full of astronauts, what with Steve Watanabe disappearing. And so I would like to know now what you would have me do about Jim Rose. Do you have some kind of contingency plan?”

  I waited an interminable length for a reply, an interminable length that was really not significantly longer than usual, and then the young, fresh face of Nora Huston again seemed to animate itself from out of the static and fuzz of interplanetary transmission. She was as cheerful as some telemarketer as she said, “Thanks very much, Colonel Richards. We’ll take it from here!”

  “How exactly are you going to take it from there? Do you want to fill me in on that?”

  April 25, 2026

  On the south side of the Martian equator, I imagined I could feel autumn threatening to stretch out its fingers, merciless, retributive. It was not as bad as it might have been on the South Pole, let’s say, nor was the planet tipped so badly on its axis that it was going to be a bad year as far as winter went. Still, let’s remember how cold it gets on Mars. It gets really, really cold on Mars. It can plunge toward −140 degrees Fahrenheit without much difficulty. As we have seen, it is easy to die of the cold here. Whereas on Earth, autumn can be an ennobling season, one in which you thrill to joyride out into the countryside in your sweaters and boots and perhaps with a jaunty cap, the autumn on Mars foretells a winter inimical to life of any kind. And this was a winter we were meant to survive with Mars at its aphelion—closer to 70 million miles, now, from the home planet.

  It had been a week since I’d contacted NASA, and nothing had come of my wanton interference. Not so far. Jim must have been stalking Brandon and Steve slowly, because I had heard nothing of them, these disputants. But then why ought I have? I’d been sleeping in the power station, with the door of the main console bolted shut and with a couple of drums of coolant propped in front. What I was doing was exhausting my supply of pain relief. And drinking mead. Now and again I would look down at my hand and could feel its phantom extremity. I would feel the tingling of what Brandon had removed from me. My finger of death. I couldn’t grab much with the hand anymore, and the stump was ugly, not to mention the two fingers so crudely reattached. Still, I was able to depress the plunger on a syringe and to insure that oxygen flowed into the greenhouse, not too far distant.

  Meanwhile, it was on the seventh of April, if I recollect the Earth calendar properly, that Arnie hailed me on my walkie-talkie and said that I needed to come quick. You guessed it, kids. Laurie had gone into labor. In fact, at the time of the call, she’d been in early labor for many hours. I counted back on my remaining fingers, and my initial diagnosis, though I am no obstetrician, was that it was not good that Laurie had gone into labor this promptly. This was no requisite nine-month term, not even close. Even if they’d been messing around on the Pequod only weeks into the flight out. Probably their romance dated back prior to launch. But there was no one else to be the under-assistant of gynecology that day. The rest of the Martian population was out conducting predator-and-prey games in the empty highlands. It was left to me to assist.

  I hadn’t been to the greenhouse in a while. I hadn’t paid much attention. Fate had thrown together the participants of the Mars mission. The disparate responsibilities of the Mars mission no longer required social niceties. I hadn’t even seen Arnie since Steve had clocked Abu. I’d sent a couple of messages over there, true, in which I notified them that Abu had gone on to his heavenly reward, but I said no more than this. Arnie himself had suggested euthanizing the patient, after all. We celebrated a virtual memorial service for the folks back home, and that was the extent of it. I understand the story got little play in the news outlets.

  Arnie and Laurie had floated blissfully above the infighting and the slaughter around them. They were a prelapsarian dyad with their green thumbs and their blissful attention to the homely tasks. When, at last, I went through their air lock, I was amazed by what I saw. Had they been striding around with fig leaves on it couldn’t have surprised me more. Arnie called to me from where he was, over by a small pool of water that he had somehow managed to fill up by fusing some of the liquid hydrogen fuel from the Pequod with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere. To get to the lake, as I later learned it was called, I had to go through a couple of other discrete ecosystems, namely a little forest of yew saplings, which Arnie had brought from Earth and much propagated since. They had some kind of anticarcinogenic property, these yew trees, or so it was thought, before chemotherapeutic compounds were synthesized. Tumors were still a concern on Mars, naturally, what with the cosmic rays and the thin atmosphere.

  Beyond the yew saplings, an exothermic species, and a variety of ferns and fungi, there was a desert biome—pretty easy to simulate here—in which Arnie was experimenting with various kinds of cacti, especially edible ones, like prickly pear. And then there was a transitional ecosystem, temperate, with some edible shrubs, sweet fern, mulberry, and gooseberry. I didn’t even have time to get over to the vegetable garden, where the extra-strength grow lamps were all on timers performing their appointed tasks.

  “Jed? Jed?”

  The expectant couple were to be found by the lake. Laurie crouched on one of the space blankets that had accompanied us on our flight over, NASA logo prominently featured beneath her exposed undercarriage. She was pale, sweaty, breathless, and her generous brown locks, which she had let grow on Mars, were matted and plastered to her face. I could see that Arnie was already positioned at the relevant biological exit, where the little Martian boy or girl was already trying to get its head out through the available space, beneath the pelvis. Arnie was muttering about how symbolically rich it was to catch the baby. Arnie’s hands were covered in blood, and he pointed out to me that he’d had to cut a little bit to make the way easier, even though the baby was several months premature, and thus would be undersized.

  “Premature?” I said. “You two must have been busy with the, uh, the conception way back in—”

  Arnie fixed me with a disgusted stare and said, “I don’t have time for your games. If you’re up to it, get to work. What I need is for you to hold her hand like the decent guy you are, okay? Encourage her? And await instructions. I’ll need your help with the umbilical cord and the placenta.”

  I was humbled, because I hadn’t intended to be the wretch I had become on Mars. I got down on the soil and dust that formed the floor of the greenhouse. I became an eager toiler in the delivery room.

  “Laurie,” I said, delicately, “how you doing?”

  Between hurried breaths, she said, “Worse than the first day of zero gravity training.”

  “It’s going to be over soon,” I said. “Look at it that way. And you won’t have to smile for the cameras after.”

  Arnie was nervously mumbling orders, as if he had a phalanx of trained residents behind him, awaiting his instruction, all of the mumbling orbiting around this question: Why had labor begun so early? It would take a while, it would take several more births, before it would be possible to say whether environmental factors played some kind of role in how children were born on Mars. We just don’t know yet, he was saying nervously. It could, of course, he muttered to himself, just be this particular fetus. “Come on, honey, another push, if you can manage, and the head will be—”

  I held Laurie’s hand. She wept. And cried out. “The second’s supposed to be easier!”

  I said, “It’s a moment in history, Laurie. A moment in history. Think of what you’re doing for everyone. People back home. This is a great and selfless act. This is something that was going to happen, that had to happen, and you’re the person who’s doing it. You’re bringing into being the first Martian of higher intelligence. The first mammalian Martian. Did you think this was going to happen back when you were a kid? Growing up in… Where did you grow up, again? I don’t think you had any idea.” And I just kept blathering, though it w
as hard to feel as upbeat as required. I could see that Arnie, despite his worry, was also excited, in the way an expectant father might be, even when that father is on a deserted planet with a dwindling supply of food, fuel, and allies. It’s just hard not to think of a baby as some kind of optimistic statement. I don’t know if NASA felt that way about it, but still. The baby’s head, in due course, emerged from the squatting, contracting Laurie. Then it was just about getting the shoulders through.

  “Laurie,” I went on, “they’re preparing the online news portfolios back home. I swear they are. I actually talked to them. Did I tell you that? The boobs at the agency. Did I tell you? I talked to them, and so they are up to speed. On the developments. Anyway, you can bet they know about this. They have their ways, apparently, of knowing everything that’s going on. They have their overflights. Just keep breathing, that’s it. Push a little harder now. This is the hard part, Laurie, just push a little harder. On Earth people are going to be making films about this, and writing testimonials, singing songs.”

  “Jed,” she said, “please be quiet?”

  I was thinking about Ginger, I guess. I was assisting, but I was thinking about my daughter. I was wondering if Ginger was worrying, because Ginger kept up on the Mars mission. Or she used to. Maybe now her teenage life was too consuming, with its many gossipy e-mails and videoconferencing conversations rocketing around the globe, conversations her mother wasn’t keeping up on.

  Perhaps it will come as no surprise that I was late for Ginger’s birth. Let me use this space to atone. I was in the armed forces at the time. I left behind a spring offensive in Tajikistan, where we were guarding the natural-gas pipelines with 50,000 NATO troops under German command. I’d been involved in covert operations but had been wounded in action. In a ridiculous way. A scimitar had been applied to me as I walked down a busy street in that nation’s capital. There’d been some haggling over a black market case of vodka. The outcome of this haggling did not favor the peddler. Anyway, this injury, which left a rather sexy scar on my left shoulder blade, was enough to allow me to return home to see the miraculous birth of Ginger Stark-Richards. Have I mentioned how much I loved my wife, Pogey Stark-Richards, in those days? My wife’s strength was immense; she just put up with a lot, in her pursuit of this idea of family, kids. She put up, I mean, with me.