by Rick Moody
Now there was time enough for Brandon and even Steve, who kept turning back to survey the progress of the fight before nearly hitting various boulders, to understand how disheveled and unlike himself Captain Jim Rose appeared. Not the magnetic and dashing former military hero who was, in the press, one of the bright stars of the Mars mission. Steve’s question to himself later was: Had he himself fallen as far as Jim? Had he become someone else entirely, a nomad of the desert of this place, a miner in the salt mines of Mars, someone capable of malevolence or of crimes that were unacceptable to his earthling analogue?
The rover ground along the floor of the Ius Chasma, its enormous and threatening wall flush against the side of the vehicle. Brandon lay in the back clutching at an assortment of burns and wounds, until they came, after thirty minutes’ time, to the collapse where a slope had been rendered for them. A slope brushed clear of debris by the ceaseless winds. Elsewhere, Jim was undoubtedly heading for his ultralight, where he would wait for sunlight in order to conduct the second phase of the manhunt. Steve and Brandon needed to get as much lead time on him as they could. But the question was which way to go? They were soon to be on the far side of the Ius Chasma, and it had taken Brandon a good ten days to get there when first surveying his mining sites. Upon crossing the chasm, they would be far enough from the campsites containing the remaining Martian colonists, not to mention food and water, to make long-term survival difficult.
It was the beginning of night. If they wore their thermal jumpsuits, there was the chance that the ionic reflectors sewn into them would be visible from space. By these means, anyone with a brain in his head would be able to track them. On the steep slope up onto the plateau, Steve did his best to keep the rover from toppling. Likewise he did his best to keep Brandon from falling out. They were making a lot of noise, the kind of noise that, if the wind were to die down, would be echoing up and down the canyon for kilometers.
Yet Steve felt a profound exhilaration, a giddy sense of accomplishment, when they had ascended to the vertiginous shelf and could look down upon it, as into the very center of the Red Planet’s formation, its most show-offy line drawings, to know that they had once again thwarted the desire of Mars to squash any eruption of life. The sun was just now over the line of the horizon, and the Milky Way was splashed across the canvas of the galaxy, and they had only this illumination to get them out into the center of the plateau, four or five kilometers off from the cliff wall, where Steve shut down the engine, sputtering from a shortage of fuel. It was here that an urgent and unlikely-to-succeed plan began to formulate. Steve suggested that he and Brandon get under the rover and put on oxygen tanks and masks and see, thus arrayed, if they could keep each other warm. Under the rover, that is, in case they were being watched from above.
Which they were, kids. Being watched. I have passed the point in the story that I assembled from Steve Watanabe’s notes. In any event, his notes, his dispatches from his lowly position as a miner of silicon oxide and water crystals on Mars, were not composed in such a way as to convey detailed or meaningful editorializing about his predicament. These notes, in fact, could be boiled down to a few simple words, words that any reader, such as yourself, would have been able to fathom, if you were a flunky at NASA reading them: Help us, please! That’s what he was attempting to convey in the days before he found himself, according to these conjectures, sleeping outside in the Martian night, next to a fellow who may or may not have been infected with some dire germ, such as M. thanatobacillus, the germ that was reputed to cause higher life-forms to disassemble. Huddling up, he and Brandon looked sort of the way our companion species, our pair of felines, our dog and cat, look when they are nestled together. For whatever reason, Steve Watanabe kept thinking of Debbie Quartz (this is how I reconstruct it), Debbie rappelling out into the vastness of space, Debbie quickly becoming a speck, and how quickly gone, and he wondered if her body was preserved exactly as it was at the instant she made her decision, and how far out? Was it out toward Jupiter? Did it have insufficient thrust to get that far? Did the thrust of one of those oxygen tanks enable any so-called head of steam at all? Maybe it would be possible in some way to figure out where her body was on the way back. Maybe it would be possible someday, when interplanetary travel was more routine, to find Debbie Quartz’s body and to return it to her cousins and nephews, which was what remained, as he understood it, of the Quartz family. But he kept imagining, in his delirious semi-sleep, that it was Debbie whose physique was being disassembled, until he included Brandon too in this ugly bit of dream work, Brandon, right beside him, disassembling. When Steve woke, according to the fantasy, Brandon’s body would be a splatter of blood and guts beside him, like what’s left after a tomato is heaved at a cement wall, and worse, what if it was somehow communicable, the germ, what if mere contact with the blood and guts, the tomato leavings, was somehow enough to pass on the disassembly to himself, just by the mere touching? What if that was enough? Was it somehow the interaction between the germ and some carbon-based cellular material that activated a new bit of disassembly? Was it somehow radioactive too, like so much on the surface of the planet? Because the course of the illness certainly resembled radiation sickness. The infected body just started to fail at the molecular level, the stomach and intestines began to liquefy and to spill their contents into the body cavity, the liver began to shudder to a halt and to seize up, squirting poisons into the bloodstream; it was just like in that rash of polonium killings that swept through the Russian Republic before the beginning of Cold War II. Maybe it, the germ, was like that, it was like radiation sickness. Maybe Steve just shouldn’t have been spooning so close to Brandon Lepper. Maybe character changes, psychological distress and disturbance, were the leading edge of the infection, along with that change in skin pigment. Although everyone on the Mars mission had a change in skin pigment, even Abu had had one, and then that led Steve back to Abu, and the horror of Abu, and how could he have done what he’d done to Abu, unless he too was already infected. Abu was a peace-loving guy, a fervent Muslim, despite his parents’ being these renowned astrophysicist types, and why was it that he, Steve, who had never prevailed in any physical confrontation, had crept up on Abu while he was out working on his sculptures and contused him? Was that part of the interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome, or was it more like the kind of character changes that were associated with the early stages of the bacterial infection? Every time he thought about the space suit that contained Debbie Quartz spinning out into the beyond, there was a different body in it; at first it was Debbie, and then it was José, and then after José it was Abu Jmil, whom he’d known since they roomed together during training, and how could he have done what he’d done, except by reason of the unremitting loneliness of this place? You could feel it every step you took outside one of the capsules, the loneliness assaulted you, like the cosmic rays, like the dust devils, like the howling winds. And the fact that Abu just didn’t seem to feel this, and didn’t seem at all affected by interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome, it just was too much to take, with his renowned parents back there in Kansas City or wherever it was he came from. And they hobnobbed with politicians, his parents, and they appeared on the evening news as expert commentators. Every time there was an asteroid that looked like it was going to strike the Earth. Every time there was talk of some new space initiative, Dr. Jmil was there with his perfect British accent and his equally brilliant and talented wife. Abu could whistle all the Brandenburg Concertos, and he spoke five different languages, and he tried to solve difficult problems in mathematics when he was bored, and nothing bothered him on the Mars mission, not having a soldering iron pointed at his eye, not forecasts of an infectious agent, not the dwindling of the food supply and the nonappearance of a resupply capsule. Abu said the lack of food was good for them, because in controlled studies, rats who were fed less lived that much longer. The most irritating part of the whole thing was that Abu never seemed to feel lonely, not even once. Nor did he seem ever to ha
ve sex with anyone, not Debbie or Laurie or any of the men. As far as Steve could tell he didn’t even masturbate. There was no girl back on Earth; there were only mathematics problems, and Brandenburg Concertos, and sculptures. Steve felt as though he’d been driven to it. He’d been driven to take Abu down because the absolute liberty of space demanded it. Everything high was brought low, and everything low was briefly, ephemerally high, before being toppled once again. And in Steve’s semisleep, he saw Abu in Debbie Quartz’s space suit, and Abu was drifting out toward Jupiter, except that Abu seemed unconcerned, even serene, about the wending of his way. If it was his lot on the mission to drift as far as Jupiter, then he would drift as far as Jupiter, and he would keep a running commentary of his own death, except that it was not to be so easy for Steve, observing this space suit and its hapless victims, because he too would have to wear it, and that was what he did, at some point in the middle of the night, he saw himself in the space suit, looking out, and he saw the two ships, uncoupling and heading off, and he felt the last of the oxygen, and he wanted to clutch at his lungs as he breathed in some more carbon dioxide, and then some more, and then he began to tumble into the long sleep in which he was never to be recovered by human history.
Upon awaking, Steve Watanabe found that Brandon was gone. Considering the portion of the night he’d spent awake, this seemed frankly miraculous, nearly as miraculous as the fact that Steve was still alive. He had no food, he had almost no water, he hadn’t bathed in so long he could scarcely remember what pleasure was afforded by bathing. But he was alive. And he was in possession of the rover, and all he had to do was start it and drive around the long way, into the outflow channels of the chasma, and around, and he would be back among the living. It might take a little while, but still. That is assuming, you know, that he intended to rejoin the rest of the crew. Maybe it was some kind of residual guilt about Brandon, and about the bad shape that Brandon had appeared to be in when they last had a conversation, but Steve found that the one way he could expiate some of the remorse he felt about everything that had happened on the Mars mission was to drive back to the site of the dig, so that his son and his wife would be well looked after, so that things would be made right. He waited for the morning sun to charge up the rover, and then he began driving back toward the cliff wall, looking for the spot where they’d come up. This while keeping his eyes fixed on the sky for the marauding ultralight.
In time, he came upon the collapsed section of the wall, which looked quite a bit more fearsome going down than it had coming up, even with the gentler slope, the sort of clamshell slope of the collapse. This was when Steve Watanabe—because going down is always more dangerous than going up—somehow managed, first to get the rover stuck between a couple of sheets of rock, and then, in attempting to dislodge it through expert manipulation of gears and transmission, to plunge the rover off a steep incline, and, luckily separated from it, to free-fall, landing on a shelf about two hundred meters or so above the floor of the Ius Chasma. The rover landed facedown, at the bottom, so that many of its solar panels were shattered in the accident, and it would have taken any number of Martian colonists, a group of them, to overturn the vehicle and restore it to running condition. In the meantime, Steve Watanabe also fell into unconsciousness.
May 1, 2026
There can no longer be a language with which to describe the psychology of Captain Jim Rose, because his consciousness as it might now have been described was so other from Jim Rose, as I had understood him, that language itself no longer applied. In the process of hunting Brandon Lepper on foot, Jim was reduced to a very primordial set of impulses. Of what did his consciousness consist? His command structure was at its most uncomplicated. He wanted only to find Brandon and squeeze the life out of him. It was no longer entirely apparent, nor would it have been to the old Jim, why this was so important. But the impulse remained to be satisfied, and Jim followed the tracks in the sand, and with an acute sense of smell that was new to him, he tasted the breezes. Amid the natural sulfur reek of this desolate place, he smelled the desperation of Brandon.
Jim would have been troubled by the spontaneous bleeding, had he language with which to describe it. The spontaneous bleeding was happening from a number of unlikely places. From interstitial spots in his physique, the crevice in his elbow, from somewhere in his neck. He would have been frightened in language, but outside of language he was just irritated with the gouts of blood that occluded his eyes. Or he was slowed down. The same with the rents in the uniform that he was wearing. He had slept out in the desert and had been incautious, for a lack of language, about preventing frostbite. The tips of his fingers had lost all sensation, but he had no particular allegiance to the individual fingers. He had no particular allegiance to anything except to the tracking and elimination of Brandon Lepper.
Brandon was traveling west, and so Jim followed westerly, though this meant that they were moving farther along the cliff face of the Valles Marineris, and farther away from the rest of the colonists. Brandon’s path was erratic. Here he swerved in on the plateau, and here he seemed to decide that if he didn’t keep the Ius Chasma on his left, he was doomed to wandering endlessly, unsure of his location.
It was on the morning of the third day that Jim, who had slowed to a few meager steps for each minute that passed on the Martian clock, saw, up ahead, a body slumped over in the sands, and he knew, in a way that was no longer of language, that he had treed his quarry, so to speak. He had little left to accomplish in his time on Mars. He rested, now that Brandon was in sight, and licked his fetid and cracking lips, which were streaming with some combination of viscosities that would not entirely clot, despite the lack of fluids in him. The rest of him, his back brain seemed to suggest, would aid in the dispatch of the evildoer. Brandon, meanwhile, as Jim drew closer, also readied himself. He was in possession of a knife, or perhaps a homemade razor, his Taser having plunged into the canyon, and the reflection from this weapon kept striking Jim retinally, so that, in a primeval way, he too knew to be prepared. And Brandon took this opportunity to try to use language, what was left of it, to head off the mortal assault that was in his immediate future. Since Jim didn’t care about language any longer, and had cast himself back into some much more elemental system of clicks and grunts, this poetical and uninflected plea for Brandon’s life was lost on him. Brandon muttered something about the good times they’d had together in the old days. Perhaps he said something like: “Can’t you just let me do what NASA brought me here to do?” Or : “Do you know what this meant to me?” Or something like this: “Could you really cut a man’s life short?” Which was not a question Jim asked himself. He responded resoundingly in the positive with a quickening of his pulse at the idea of squeezing the life out of Brandon. It was invigorating, except that he was not in possession of the concept of vigor. “You know that if you get back to Earth they will execute you.” But what was Earth to Jim now? Earth was nothing.
The moment of last resort was upon Lepper now. Pleas for mercy had gone unheard. Appeals to Captain Jim Rose’s conscience had elicited no reply. Lepper had only one remaining bargaining chip that he could introduce into the exchange. As Jim approached, Brandon rummaged in the pocket of his jumpsuit (which, kids, let me tell you, is not easy to do with the gloves on, even though the gloves are magnetically tipped in order to make it easier, theoretically, to pick up tools). With the onrushing of his antagonist, he was unable, at first, to procure the item he wanted to procure, but in time he did. He pulled it out, and in the palm of his glove, at first, it looked perhaps like some ancient home-rolled stogie, or perhaps like a small doughy confection that was ready to be oven fired into an agreeable dinner roll.
It was my finger.
“You looking for this?” Brandon said, and now the malice in his heart, since he believed his cause was nearly lost, surfaced in him, and he didn’t care any longer what Jim thought. “You looking for the finger of your friend? He’s your friend, right? Or maybe he was a li
ttle more than your friend? José, you know, he really wasn’t that bad a guy, until he went all soft, and at first he was kind of worried that he had been bunked on the gay capsule. So maybe you want a little memento of your good friend. I’ll give you this if you let me go. I think it’s only a little bit decomposed. Actually, you know, the Martian surface would be really good for tanning skins. Look how well preserved this is!”
And it is likely, kids, that this was an accurate description of my finger, which in the months since it had been separated from me had mostly been cleaned of the blood and gluey material that it secreted at first. It was now mainly a talisman. And that must have been the reason Brandon kept it, to remind himself that there was something that divided him from me, from the rest of us. He believed, at this late hour—while holding aloft in one hand his straight razor and in the other my finger—in duty, nothing more, and was willing to die a nasty, unrepentant death in order to indicate how devoted he was to his concept of duty. Jim Rose was happy to oblige.
