No Marigolds in the Promised Land

by T S Hottle

  But not poor John Farno, last man on Farigha. Nope, I gotta hunt for a bunch of beeping things buried in the sand in parallel straight lines. That took about an hour, and I was almost two kilometers off course. Yikes!

  Once I found the sensor road again, I let the rover drive itself. I am not a daredevil, and speeds of fifty kilometers an hour without the aid of a soft brain terrify me. Once I let the machine do the work, however, I got bored too easily. So, I had the computer play some of Ellis’s music.

  “Computer,” I said, happy to be on something left of civilization, “a little travelin’ music, if you please.”

  Who the hell was Willie Nelson? And what sort of herbal intoxicant prompted him to write a repetitious ditty called “On the Road Again”? And why wouldn’t someone load a Humanic version of the song instead?

  LOG ENTRY: 1539 15-Sagan, 429

  I had to kill the music. Ellis left behind a ton of ambient music, more that I suspect even the musicians who made it would keep. And he left plenty of Caliphite dance music, most of which starts to sound the same after about twenty minutes. But holy shit, how much really old travel music can one man leave behind? I suspect this is not Ellis’s. I think someone planted it in the rover as a joke and didn’t realize the soft brain would suck in anything it could find from Farigha’s entire internet.

  Which wasn’t that big to begin with before Musk was flattened.

  Now you may think I’ve been sitting here in my hermetically sealed box on wheels while the soft brain did all the work. No. I’ve been sorting out what I pillaged from Ellis’s cave. Mainly, I’ve been organizing my food to last for thirty days. I thought of putting that fatal tube of painkillers at the bottom and swallowing it all with my last meal. Cheery thought. Then I realized that, without any guarantee of human help, I may need to locate another tube of painkillers just to function if something bad happens. I’m going to have to set my own broken bones, and that’s going to hurt like hell. So… Who knows what I’ll do if and when the time comes?

  Ellis wasn’t cocky. He did stock his pop tent with medical supplies, so I have that and the rover’s stash going for me. I’m more interested in tools. Thirty days is a long time to push a rover, even on a terraforming project such as Farigha. It’s going to breakdown. Take that as a given. As long as the soft brain stays functional, I have at least some semblance of an internet. And I can talk to it to run diagnostics. The O2 tanks, the scrubbers, and the fusion core are all passive systems. Turn off the fusion core, and the solar wrap takes over. The core has enough fuel in it for ten years. We designed these things to stay out in the wild indefinitely as robot beacons and probes. Plus, left idle for long periods, they can be heated up and brought fully online quickly enough for someone stranded out in the middle of nowhere.

  Which brings me to my latest revelation. I was pretty sure Musk was gone when I woke up in the wee hours of yesterday, but I was too groggy to panic. So, why didn’t I just accept that when I did wake up and find Farigha’s satellite constellation, its lunar array, and any dome in line of sight offline? Well, kids, you see, I had to function until I could get visual confirmation of Musk’s destruction. That’s why I used denial. Denial allows me to function in the face of almost anything that tells me I’m fucked. Side effects include curling up in the fetal position when one can no longer ignore the truth, nausea, vomiting, and delusions that the planet has been taken over by a race of ginger nymphos who want me to help them repopulate their homeworld. Ask your doctor if denial is right for you.

  Mind you, I’ve had to lower the dosage since finding a glass pancake where Musk used to stand. I’m going with a temper tantrum when I see New Ares flattened.

  If I see New Ares flattened. Science demands proof of one’s hypothesis when it’s available, so my theory that I’m the last man on this planet remains speculation. I’ll know what happened to New Ares in the morning. Tonight, I’ll have to stop around 1830 hours and start working on deploying the pop tent, as well as working out a way to do EVAs without having to bring the tent inside and packing it. I hope it has a backdoor of sorts. Right now, it’s taking up too much room, and I want to be able to stretch out during breaks while the rover is moving.

  In the meantime, I’m studying a cached map of Farigha. I hope it’s up-to-date. It shows where emergency supplies, rest caves, and maintenance depots are located. And then…

  At some point, I’m going to need to figure out how to talk to the Compact, let them know someone is alive here. I could wait for the Navy, but the Navy barely knows colony worlds exist. Why do you think we only have one hypergate and one orbital station? (Both offline, so let’s assume they’re scrap for now.)

  Reporting from… the boondocks, this is John Farno, signing off.

  LOG ENTRY: 2005 15-Sagan, 429

  Greetings from the pop tent! I got it deployed. It was originally designed to explode out of a rover. Best of all, it’s a nano-tent, so I experimented with different sizes. The nanites can make it as big or small as I want within reason.

  On the downside, if I want to do an EVA, I either have to slide under an emergency escape hatch under the console up front or collapse the tent. The tent, in its collapsed form, can mold itself to the airlock hatch, so I’ve got that going for me. Just collapse, then use the airlock normally. The trouble is I have to take all my stuff out of there. And while the ambient heat of the core keeps the air breathable and at non-fatal temperatures, it does not really warm it up to what most humans call comfortable. Mind you, until three nights ago, I shared a bed with a woman who insisted on keeping the room at fourteen degrees Celsius, the night temperature of a warmer planet in late spring or early autumn. Most people keep their rooms at about 20 degrees. I ordered a comforter on the first cargo run after we began sharing quarters and wrapped myself in it. Even more puzzling, Amy slept wearing nothing but a thin cotton tunic and a worn pair of zula-thread panties with no blanket. “They’re from Etrusca,” she would say, as if that explained why anyone would sleep in fourteen-degree temperatures with no blanket. Until she and I became a couple, I never slept with socks on.

  As it is, the vent I rigged up from the rover’s interior keeps the room at a toasty twenty-five. I’m actually sweating a little. The soft brain has instructions to wake me an hour before dawn, so I can pack the tent and do an EVA to check the rover. If all goes well, I should reach New Ares, or what’s left of it, by midday. In the meantime, I’m going to stretch out and listen to the soothing strains of Trantorian ambient music.

  Sounds like someone fell asleep on their keyboard for twenty minutes. But it’s kinda pretty.

  LOG ENTRY: 2351 15-Sagan, 429

  The music stopped about an hour ago. The silence woke me up. I’m laying here in the dark, and all I can hear is the wind against the tent and the rover. Other than an occasional sound out of the computer or the whir of the vents, every sound I hear is not of direct human origin. Sound may not carry well outside where the atmosphere is thin enough to make blood boil on exposure, but it does carry.

  Normally, you hear something of human activity outside, even if it is some bot trundling down the sensor road, radio chatter between domes and the various pit stops in between them. One night out on the road is nothing. I do one each way between domes. I actually slept in a sealed cave on my way to Kremlin a few nights ago, and robotic carriers made a racket outside. Did not sleep well until I reached the dome. On the way back…

  I still don’t know who flattened Musk and the other domes. I do know I hate them, whoever they are. I can’t think of a good reason why you would want to incinerate a few thousand people without warning. Not unless the Compact pissed someone off, likely someone we’ve never heard of.

  Great. I’m not going to get any sleep tonight. Goodnight, posterity. I've got a busy day of staving off extinction tomorrow.

  DAY 3:

  NEW ARES

  LOG ENTRY: 0632 16-Sagan, 429

  Good morning, posterity. And isn’t it a lovely day? The sand i
s blowing. And that’s pretty much it. I’m probably going to have to do a few EVAs and shovel around the rover. When the sand blows on this rock, it’s worse than snow. Snow melts. Snow sticks together. Snow’s biggest problem is that there’s usually too much of it. Sand just has a mind of its own. I can hear it laughing. Okay, maybe that was me falling asleep last night.

  I woke up a few times after midnight and decided sleeping with my clothes on was a bad idea. So, I stripped down and slept naked. That lasted until around 0100 when it occurred to me that, if the tent had a breach, I’d be screwed. Naked people don’t do well on Farigha outside the confines of pressurized objects like domes and rovers. I put on my emergency pressure suit. It’s not really an EVA suit. Rather, it tightens around the body and heats up long enough for someone, say, fifty meters from a rover, about the average distance a pop tent is pitched when detached from a rover, to either run to safety or get their EVA suit on. You keep your helmet nearby, which has an emergency O2 cartridge that’ll last ten minutes.

  I drilled in the emergency pressure suit a few times on Mars, part of my training for this job. Not fun. Your head is exposed for a few minutes to the outside atmosphere. The suit goes from loose and comfortable to claustrophobic in less than a second, and the change feels like getting squashed in some sort of crusher. Every time I did the drill, I emerged from the airlock winded with a touch of frostbite on my ears and nose. My eyes would be bloodshot for days. Fortunately, Farigha’s settlements are all at or near its equator. Near the poles, if the tent ruptured at night, I would simply be a meat popsicle before the pressure suit kicked in. Never mind the helmet. My head would be a frozen block of ice. Last I checked, humans can’t survive that sort of trauma.

  At least the suit is somewhat comfortable to sleep in and often reacts passively to the atmosphere around it. My body rested in a comfy 19 degrees Celsius while the cabin stayed at around 25. I have a somewhat comfortable way to sleep (Thanks, Ellis!) and a means of keeping my sanity in check.

  Now, you may be wondering how the sophisticated sole survivor of an apocalypse travels when all he has is a pop tent and a rover that eventually will need serviced. What’s in this tent? The late Mr. Ellis actually kept this thing and a kit packed away in his hidey hole for easy deployment and stowing on his trips into the great wide open. He kept a portable chem toilet that empties into the rover’s recycling system. That came in handy right before I started this log entry. He rigged up an ingenious system for taking a sponge bath. I risked stripping off the pressure suit to do this. Hey, bathing and leg room have become high-end luxuries on this planet. Used to be I could use all the hot water I wanted thanks to the permafrost supplying the dome tanks. Food goes in one small, heavy container, personal items in another. Both are heavy so, if the tent breaches, and I manage to get my helmet on in time, I don’t have to go hunting for them. Plus, they hold the tent down, so it doesn’t go flying off into the far reaches. The only personal item I brought into the tent was the pad I’m recording this on now. It’ll do for now. It lets me tap into the rover’s onboard library and listen to more of Ellis’s Caliphite dance music.

  So what is on the agenda for the Last Man on Farigha® today? Glad you asked that, future intelligent life form who happened upon my desiccated remains centuries from now. First off, I have to develop my repacking routine. Since the tent is a nanotent designed to collapse and mold itself to an airlock if necessary, I’m not too worried about it. Everything inside the tent should stow nicely in the back of the rover near the reactor housing and oxygenator.

  After breakfast – gelava fruit bars. Might as well use them up so when my food runs out, it’s not the last thing I have to eat. Too depressing. Anyway, after breakfast, I’ll be suiting up to do an EVA, probably shoveling sand away from the rover and cleaning off the solar wrap. Why should I care about the solar wrap? If the fusion reactor fails – ie. turns the last of its fuel to helium at some point – I’m going to need power. Hopefully, I’ll find an intact dome before that happens, but think about it. Municipal fusion plants are redundant things. They build one, bring it online, then build a second one. They refuel once every twenty years. When Plant One uses up its fuel, its core is removed while Plant Two goes online, and the radioactive scrap metal is packed off somewhere to spend the next fifty years to become not-quite-toxic. Free scrap for recycling. Then they build a new core while Plant Two is online, and the process repeats.

  My fusion core is about the size of a large packing crate and gets buried for detox about six months after it's spent. If no one comes or I don’t find an intact projection drive ship before the end of this core’s life span, I am going to be at the mercy of 2 Mainzer’s rays, which means driving at night and sleeping during the day while the solar wrap recharges the batteries. No power means no oxygen, no heat, no witty, inciteful log entries. And what a loss to humanity on this planet that would be.

  After the EVA, I’m going to test deploy the tent again to make sure my system for it is still in place. It should work. But in five hundred years of human space travel, should has killed more people in the best of circumstances than the sheer unknown. Since I’m not interested in dying prematurely, we test.

  Once all my morning festivities are concluded, I have to travel the final 260 kilometers to New Ares. I’m hoping it’s not a glass pancake, that maybe its comms are just off-line. I keep telling myself that. And yet the pragmatic part of my brain is already thinking about pit stops and storage caves along the sensor road from New Ares to Helium, the next dome over. I’ll be studying whatever maps of Farigha I can find.

  While I’m traveling and listening to Caliphite dance music, I’ve decided to figure out where the hell the Martian government came up with all the names. I know 2 Mainzer is named for an astronomer from the World War era, and Musk is named for an early proponent of commercial colonization of Mars. Kremlin is a city or a palace on Earth. (Never could figure out which. Who cares? It’s Earth.) But a lot of the names are related. Might explain why the third dome I plan to visit was named for the second element on the periodic chart. Methinks it has nothing to do with that.

  When I first came here, they were going to name the planet "Barsoom," which sounds even stranger than Farigha. One of the senior terraformers, however, grew up on The Caliphate and preferred the Arabic word for, more or less, "the big empty." I kinda like Barsoom better. According to the soft brain’s wiki, Barsoom is a literary reference to a fictionalized Mars from early in the World War Era. And it just so happens the soft brain has a Humanic translation of that first literary reference to the name, Princess of Mars by a guy named Edgar Rice Burroughs. I’ll be listening to that while the rover trundles its way toward the next glass panc– Er, um, dome. Have to stay positive.

  LOG ENTRY: 1014 16-Sagan, 429

  Holy shit, Earth people were stupid. No wonder they had three world wars and two cold wars. Princess of Mars has got to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to figure out how John Carter gets out of this next one.

  LOG ENTRY: 1911 16-Sagan, 429

  Glass pancake. Again. Whatever destroyed Musk destroyed New Ares. Since the dome sat on a mesa, itself on a plateau of the Zond foothills, driving around the dome’s remains in the rover was out of the question. After a quick check of the EVA oxygen levels, I went out and walked the perimeter. That was three hours of hell. The edge, despite the blast, is still rocky and sometimes runs along a sheer drop-off.

  Pro tip: Ninety minutes into an EVA is not a time to realize you might need more than a patch kit to survive outside the rover. I’ll have to find a way to make the suit more redundant, since I stepped on a loose section of rock and slid. Only the outer layer of the suit opened, enough to set the alarms in my helmet off. The patch kit did its job. A combination of resin and nanite cultures, the suit will be restored to its original state by tomorrow. It’s still usable in the meantime.

  By the last third of my trip around the dome’s remains, I found m
yself walking on smooth, blackened glass. That bothers me. I’m walking on what amounts to the grave of at least seven hundred people.

  Since New Ares was raised above the sensor road, a by-pass had been laid out along the bottom of the dome’s mesa. Unfortunately, the sensors that led into and out of the dome have rained down into the alternate path, confusing the soft brain. I’m going to have to drive through it.

  But mountains and the dust storms to the west that I just drove through are making manual driving at night treacherous. Did a walkaround of the rover after my last EVA. Deploying the pop tent.

  On the upside, I finished A Princess of Mars. I plan to listen to Gods of Mars tomorrow. I’m hoping Burroughs had an idea of how to get off Mars with no spaceship. Well, clearly, he did, or his whole story would have collapsed. Hey, I gotta dig for inspiration somewhere.

  LOG ENTRY: 2002 16-Sagan, 429