Before Mars

by Emma Newman

  Banks rolls his eyes. “Take no notice,” he says, nudging Petranek with his elbow good-naturedly. “They’re all the same model and print with exactly the same base ingredients.”

  “Come on, Elvan—back me up!” Petranek appeals.

  Elvan holds up his hands, knife and fork pinched between his fingers. “I can’t offer any data. I only use the one in here,” he says and Petranek groans.

  “Coward,” ze declares and looks back at me. “The one in here does desserts better.” That earns another jab in the ribs from Banks and ze laughs. “Whatever. So, how are you settling in?”

  I take a sip of orange juice—appreciating for a moment just how good the printer is at tricking me into thinking this liquid has come from an orange—and set the glass down again. “Fine.”

  “Any questions?”

  “I do have one . . .” I pause, trying to decide if it’s a stupid one. “Do you all call each other by your surnames, like, all the time?”

  Petranek grins. “Yeah, it’s a habit we got into when there were three Johanns here at one point.”

  “It worked great until we had two Chans,” Elvan says. “But it usually works. When I went home the last time, I couldn’t get used to being Asil again. Even my brothers started calling me Elvan.”

  “You’ll get used to it, Kubrin. I don’t even know what your first name is anymore,” Petranek says to Banks, earning another jab in the ribs. Ze laughs. “Have you apologized yet?” ze says to him. Banks frowns to himself. “Come on.”

  “I am sorry for earlier,” he says. “It won’t happen again.”

  The way he says it is so familiar. I say things like that too, when I’m trying to remind myself of a boundary I need to draw inside myself, closing off a set of thoughts from ever being publicly expressed. He’ll still feel the same way about me. He’s just committing to not showing it again.

  “You were right about some of it,” I say, eager to smooth the waters. I’m not quite ready to let go of the fantasy of becoming his friend. At least, friends with the man I thought he was. “I am only here because Gabor insisted upon it. But I really am a geologist above anything else.” My husband would agree, even above being a wife and a good mother.

  “In the briefing we got about you,” Elvan says, in an effort to distract me from Banks’s glower, “it said you’re an artist and that we need to support your trips outside. What kind of things should we expect to help you with, other than getting to grips with the suit and safety protocols?”

  “I want to go outside as much as possible in the first few weeks. I need to collect samples and make observations.”

  “Is that for the art or for the geology?” Banks asks with a slight sneer.

  “Both,” I reply, ignoring it.

  “Were you briefed on why the need for a team geologist was downgraded?” he asks.

  “Banks . . .” Petranek frowns at him.

  “I’m not being a dick about it,” Banks says and looks back at me. “It’s a genuine question.”

  “I actually spoke to the last one posted here,” I reply, “shortly after she got back to Earth. She said there was still such a lot to be done and couldn’t understand why the decision had been made.”

  “She didn’t mention the fact that we’ve discovered enough water deposits to sustain the base for over thirty years?”

  “Is that all you think a geologist is good for? Finding water?” I’m trying so hard not to sound annoyed, but having had the same argument with the managers at varying levels between Drew and Gabor, it’s difficult. “There’s so much left to understand here. So much history. And if there are any plans to extend the human footprint on Mars, we need to understand so much more.”

  “So little of that actually improves the bottom line though,” Banks says, stabbing his fork into what looks like mashed potatoes.

  “Oh JeeMuh, we’re not seriously going to have an argument about whether scientific discovery only has merit if it increases corporate profits, are we? Because believe me, I’ve spent my entire career arguing with people about different forms of merit and I thought I’d left all that bullshit behind on Earth.”

  Banks’s eyes flash with something akin to excitement. “Oh, I can assure you that some of that bullshit has landed on Mars too. I can smell it right now.”

  “What is your problem?”

  “I just want you to be honest, for fuck’s sake!” He slams his cutlery down. “I want you to stop pretending you’re here for any reason other than making Gabor even more fucking rich!”

  My body is rigid, frozen by the violent clang of the metal hitting the table. I keep my eyes on his hands, ready for the moment they move toward me, already planning where I will run when he—

  I blink. I am not a child anymore. I am not on Earth and he is not my father. I still can’t move though.

  “Banks,” Arnolfi says quietly. “You need to remember the conversation we had earlier.”

  As Banks glares at Arnolfi instead of me, I am able to take a breath once more, released from the fear that he’ll attack me. There are other people here and they won’t let him hurt me. Slowly the logic seeps into the instinctual terror, like rain into rock crevices, finding its weak spots and splitting it open until it no longer grips me. I notice how uncomfortable Elvan and Petranek are and wonder if there’s ever been any conflict here before I arrived. Probably not. They will have been selected because they work well in a team and aren’t the sort of people who pick fights. Petranek is looking at Banks like he’s sprouted horns. Like ze doesn’t know him.

  “I don’t want to cause any trouble here,” I say, eager to defuse the awful tension and to remind myself that I am an adult now and everything is different. I look at Banks. “Let’s face it—we’re all here to make Gabor richer. That’s how it works. I happen to have been sent here to create some art that will do that. You make a mersive that brings in millions of dollars a year. I am also a geologist. I want to do that work here too. Just as you carry out experiments alongside being a media star. Can you explain to me what the difference is? Because I’m missing something here, and I don’t want to live in this base with you attacking me all the time just because I don’t understand it.”

  He blinks at me and then sags slightly. “You’re right. Of course. There is no difference. I’m sorry.”

  “Did you get your heart broken by an artist once or something?” Petranek asks. There’s just enough humor in hir tone to stop it from being more fuel for the fire.

  Banks waves his hand dismissively. “I was out of order. I’m sorry.”

  The last of the tension drains from my shoulders and I feel suddenly tired.

  “How did you juggle the art and the geology back home?” Elvan asks, and I am grateful for something to answer.

  “The art is purely a hobby. Well, it was.” I shrug. “It was sheer luck that my work came to Gabor’s attention. And once he gets an idea in his head, there’s no stopping him.”

  “So you didn’t get this through a proposal process?” Petranek asks. “There wasn’t anything in the briefing about you.”

  The question makes me wonder what GaborCorp told them. Back on Earth, there was a strict media blackout over the art angle. As far as those who monitored GaborCorp’s Mars activities were concerned, I was just a geologist. There was one news feed speculating about why there was such a rush to send me, but Gabor’s lawyers soon quashed that. I asked about it when I went for my media-training module and the tutor said it was all to do with building excitement about the art to peak at the right moment. These paintings I’m contracted to produce are being sold to the super-rich. Gabor has no interest in stirring up a media furor among the masses in the vast majority of pay grades. Doing any publicity before I left Earth would have meant the story was stale before I’d even put brush to canvas. In a couple of months I’m supposed to start taking part in some of the
mersive episodes, and a cam drone will be filming me as I paint, but I’m used to that.

  “Not a proposal process, no,” I reply, feeling reluctant to tell them the story of how all this came about. It feels . . . sordid somehow, especially given Banks’s earlier outburst. “Ironically enough, I applied to come here as a geologist over ten times. I got to the final round of the proposal process one of those times, in fact. So I guess that’s why I’m keen to push the geology part,” I say to Banks, hoping for a moment of conciliation. He’s too busy working on his meal.

  “You probably got turned down because the previous geologists did their job so well,” Petranek says. “The corp wanted water sustainability guaranteed for ten years and they achieved that sooner than predicted. Bad luck for you though!”

  “Yeah, just bad luck,” I say, even though I know the real reason I was turned down. Arnolfi must know it too, having read the whole file on me. Is that why she wanted me to talk about my father?

  “So, did Gabor see your work in a gallery or something?” Petranek asks.

  I wave a hand at my full mouth, taking my time to chew and draw out the excuse for not replying as long as possible. “Do you want to see some of it?” I ask, counting on curiosity to help with the deflection. “I used to have a feed but my contract stipulated that I had to take it down.” The thought occurs to me that the lack of publicly accessible examples of my art would make it difficult for whoever the note forger could be. Would there be examples in my personnel file? Could Arnolfi have seen them and used them to copy my style and forge the note? No, that still seems ridiculous, and this isn’t the time to dwell upon it anyway.

  There are several enthusiastic nods. “So that’s why we couldn’t find it online,” Elvan says, as if it’s been bugging him for some time.

  I nod. “It was all pulled.”

  The day they did that, I felt like I had been erased. Of course, I was still all over the Internet, but only as a geologist and a wife and a mother. I felt sick, searching obsessively for just one mention of my art feed, some little nook of the Web the seek-and-destroy bots had missed. Charlie had found me hunched over, weeping and staring into space in the dark living room. He’d freaked out, put Mia in her cot to play with her special bear, and run back, put the lights on and shook me until I blinked out of the interface.

  “What’s happened?” he asked.

  “All my art is gone. They did it today. I can’t find it anywhere online. Not even a mention of it.”

  He’d flopped back and groaned. “JeeMuh, I thought it was something terrible.”

  “This is terrible!” I yelled. “It feels like I’ve died again!”

  “Again?”

  I bit my lip, staying silent, knowing he wouldn’t understand.

  “The paintings are right there.” He pointed at the canvases crammed onto the walls.

  “It’s not the same. That’s only part of it, the end of the process. That’s what’s gone.”

  “Sweetling, it’s all still in your private cloud. It hasn’t been destroyed. And I bet it’s out there somewhere.”

  “You find it, then!” I hated his tone, that way he had of making me feel like I was totally overreacting.

  With a sigh, he tried to find some himself. I watched as his slump shifted into sitting up, knowing he was challenging himself to find some scrap online to prove to me that it wasn’t so bad. When Mia cried, I went to change her, cuddled her a bit and put her back, returning to find him on his feet, working hard with virtual tools he was barely familiar with. I printed dinner, called him and then ate mine when he didn’t respond.

  “Fuck,” he finally whispered, coming over to sit next to me.

  “Want me to print you another meal?”

  “I didn’t think they could actually do that,” he said, staring past his dinner, long gone cold. “I mean, I’d heard of it, but . . . fuck. I thought that was all just conspiracy theory bollocks, you know? What else have they scrubbed from the Web?”

  “Careful,” I said. “You’ll end up like my mum.”

  He visibly shuddered and went to the printer. I could see him pushing the fear to the back of his mind, almost hear his voice in his head: Don’t think about it. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just the way the world works.

  Seated at this table now, with them all watching, I feel self-conscious using my v-keyboard and tapping icons to send the images from my private space to the communal screens, but I’m faster at it than most people are these days, and soon enough, one of my paintings is displayed.

  Like all of the pieces I feel happy to share with other people, it depicts a Martian landscape. The sky is a dull gray-blue; the land is painted in the iconic shades of rusty red that everyone associates with Mars. Other than the rocks in the foreground, which are sharply defined, it’s mostly a bleak, sweeping vista of dust and sky.

  “That’s actually really good,” Banks says.

  “You sound surprised,” I say, biting back something more cutting, and his lips twitch.

  “I suppose I am,” he admits and looks at me properly. “You’re very talented.”

  His compliment makes me feel like an eager child, hanging off the words of her favorite teacher. I suppress the urge to say, “You really think so?” and give him a small smile. “Thanks.”

  “So, Gabor saw these and decided you should come and paint in situ?” Elvan asks and I nod.

  “More or less. This image doesn’t really show the texture. If you want, I can put the scans into the communal files, so you can look at them in 3-D at your leisure. I try to build the sense of depth with the oils. Gabor wants me to experiment with texture using actual dust and rocks from here. It’s a gimmick, if you ask me, but that’s what he wants. The first art painted of Mars, on Mars, using Martian materials.”

  “Do you have any others?” Petranek asks and I display the rest on a slow-changing cycle.

  It’s not the same as seeing the actual canvases. Up close, the texturing is built up enough to cast shadows on other parts of the painting, moving as the viewer moves. That was the feature that had made Travis, Gabor’s husband, so excited that night at the dinner party.

  Charlie and I had argued about whether to take the canvases down. I wanted to; they made our tiny flat seem smaller and I didn’t want anyone to think I was showing them off to the VIP guests. Once I finished each one, the canvases were to be enjoyed in private, something separate from the digital images of them all over the Internet. But Charlie said it would be good to show my passion for Mars and how it went beyond the work we did at the lab. “And it will give us something to talk about,” he said as he chewed on a fingernail. “It might distract them from the food.”

  He was even more nervous than I was. We sent Mia to his mother’s for the night, not wanting to worry about nappy changes and feedings at the same time as entertaining the man who famously disliked children. Once Mia had gone, we packed her cot away, clearing a space in our bedroom so we could store the sofa in there, making enough room in the living room for a table large enough to sit five. We’d spent the morning making it out of our small table, plus another small table, with a large board over the top that we’d borrowed from our neighbor. Once the tablecloth was on, it looked fine.

  “The chairs don’t match,” Charlie said.

  “Even if I went and found matching chairs, they’d still be roughing it,” I’d said, long past the point of caring about whether it was good enough for the Gabors. None of it would be. Stefan Gabor earned thousands of times what I did each year. Our entire flat was probably the size of one of their guest bathrooms. No, smaller than that; the Gabors probably still had baths installed in them. Enough wealth to fill a whole bath with water just to sit in it until it went cold. While the thought appalled and angered me, it made me feel less uncomfortable about asking for more funding. The amount we needed to secure the lab for the next
five years was probably what they spent on bloody toilet paper.

  Drew arrived an hour early to “help,” as she put it, revealing a surprising talent for laying out a table nicely for dinner. It was so rare we ate formally, I was grateful for the guidance. Then before we knew it, security staff were at the door to sweep the flat before the Gabors arrived as a lawyer looked on. When they asked Charlie to step out of the kitchen, I worried that he was going to throw them out. The stress of cooking the meal was making his skin blotchy and lips white.

  I felt awful and could tell that Drew felt guilty too, offering to help Charlie just the once before being sent away with short shrift.

  Watching the security staff, and the drone that followed them, I realized that must have been what my mother felt like, all those years ago. I pushed it from my mind and tried to look relaxed. I probably ended up looking more guilty as a result.

  Once they were done, the lawyer stepped forward. He was a short man who seemed to be in a dreadful hurry to leave as soon as he’d arrived. “As per the contract you have all signed pertaining to this meeting, we’ll be blocking your APAs’ connections to the Internet while Mr. and Mr. Gabor are here. Do you have any business that needs to be concluded online before we do that?”

  Charlie made a swift call to his mother, warning her we’d be incommunicado for a few hours, and then we were cut off.

  “And of course, as per clause twelve of that contract, we’ll also be shutting down your APAs. I’d like to remind you that any online mention of this meeting”—he paused, taking in the table for the first time—“this . . . er . . . dinner party, after the event, will be considered a breach of contract and you would be prosecuted accordingly. Any questions or concerns?”

  “Does Mr. Gabor like garlic?” Charlie asked and the lawyer blinked at him.

  “I have no idea,” he finally answered. “It isn’t a listed allergen.”

  “It was just a joke,” Charlie muttered. He frowned at the way the lawyer was staring at the pan on the hob. “I got the menu signed off and all the ingredients were bought through approved suppliers,” he said defensively.