Fourth Planet from the Sun, page 28
Edgar cut in. “That’s not the same as dealing with it when it does.”
“But anticipating the problem at least gives us a basis for dealing with it,” Fidelis said calmly.
“So let’s deal,” David said. “What do we need? I’ll start. I need to play some euchre.”
“What’s euchre?” everyone else said more-or-less at once.
“Card game. It’s simple. I used to play with my dad and my uncles up in Petoskey. I’ve been playing on the computer, but it’s not the same. I miss it.” He looked to his right, where Deborah was picking dead leaves from a grapevine. She kept picking, but he could see her thinking.
“I need Edgar to leave me alone for a while,” she said.
From the Washington Post, March 13, 2011:
The Fading Fad of Mars
by Allen Holley
During the six weeks before Argos I left the International Space Station, the bandwidth of the developed world crackled with nothing but Marsnauts. During their voyage to the Red Planet, we worried how they would get along, if they would fall in love; we bet on the possibility of their failure; we spent our free time pouring information about Jami, David, Deborah, Edgar, Katherine, and Fidelis into our heads.
I thought it would peter out before they got there. Interest would spike again once they landed, of course, but apart from that and another flurry of information if they discovered something exciting—little green men or underground rivers or veins of iridium—but beyond that, I figured that the obsessive persistence of American consumerate was of fairly short duration.
I was wrong.
We have been gaga over the Marsnauts for much longer than I ever would have guessed. Chatthreads devoted to Deborah Green’s sexual orientation unspooled posts in the millions; viewership of talk shows that took Jami Salter as their subject exceeded the number of eyeballs trained on last summer’s World Cup in South Africa; applications to Argos Marsnauts’ alma maters are up more than one hundred percent since the selection of the crew.
So yes, I was wrong.
I can admit this because we are, at last, beginning to forget. Bandwidth consumption at all the newsnets is down, or at least redirected to the pipes carrying the Chinese incursion into India; Ebony Freytag is stinging from the lawsuit; the various chat forums, if not exactly quiet, are no longer as riotous as they were in the halcyon early days of Mars-mania. This despite the fact that the crew of Argos I has in fact discovered extraterrestrial life, throwing biology (and religion) on its collective ear, and begun to map huge quantities of water under the planet’s surface, meaning that colonization has abruptly become a question not of if but of when.
They have been amazingly successful. And we are starting to ignore them. Part of me can’t help but think it’s a relief.
“Deborah,” Edgar said. She snapped a tendril from the vine. “David asked what we need. I’m telling you. I tried to think of something else, but that’s it. I need you to leave me alone for a while.”
Edgar stood very still for several seconds before picking up his tool belt.
“Edgar,” David said before Edgar could leave. “Please stay.”
After a pause, Edgar put the tool belt back on the worktable in the center of the greenhouse. “Thank you,” David said, trying to keep the real gratitude out of his voice. Things were getting very deep very fast, and he had to make sure the gathering didn’t fly apart. “Katherine?”
“I would like you to ask Gates to give us more leeway in running experiments. The schedule is still predicated on searching for life that we’ve already found, and I’m wasting valuable time running useless experiments because people back in the Gates labs have already arranged to publish the results.”
David nodded. “Okay. Let’s do it this way: You start reporting to me, and I’ll send abstracts of your results to Gates. I’ll take the heat.”
“Thank you,” Katherine said. “Also, I would like to learn how to play euchre.” She smiled at him, and in that moment he could have kissed her. Whatever she said about Fidelis being the psych guy, Katherine knew the thin line David was treading, and she was doing her best to help.
“That’s two things,” he said, “but we are a resilient enough crew to handle them both, I think. Jami.”
“I need everyone to stop looking at me like I’m going crazy.”
There was a long pause.
“And I need people to please stop getting so quiet when I talk,” Jami added. “Please.”
Dear Ms. Salter,
I am a sixth-grader at Fred P. Hall Elementary School in Portland, Maine. I want to go to Mars some day. Can you tell me what college I should go to? I want to be a pilot and make sure aliens don’t take over Mars or come to Earth. Will they let me do that even though I still have to wear glasses because my mom won’t pay to burn my corneas?
Sincerely,
Megan Machado
“Noted,” David said. “We got it. You aren’t crazy, and we’ll start interrupting you. Fidelis?”
“We’re all too alone,” Fidelis said. “I need everyone to start talking to each other again . . . no. I need everyone to start listening to each other again.”
Leave it to Fidelis to be levelheaded and precise, David thought. Carrying around his own self-assurance, a banked coal hidden from the winds that tore through the rest of them.
Or he was just deep, deep water, with all the turbulence down there in the dark.
“You heard the doc,” David said. “Everybody start listening. We’re all talking—hell, I talk all the time—but we’re talking to ourselves.” Greenhouse spring, he found himself thinking. A little island in the midst of so much cold and dark. A little spring, like the one they were all missing on Earth. “I think we need to get control of this,” he went on. “As of tomorrow, we resume burst transmissions back to Earth. No more recording and storing; we send everything live.”
“Gates won’t run it,” Deborah said.
“I don’t care if Gates runs it or not. We all need to know that someone knows we’re out here. When we just record and store for the backup pipe, we’re talking to ourselves. Starting tomorrow, we talk to Earth again.”
“And I guess we’ll find out if Earth wants to talk to us,” Jami said. Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” snapped Katherine. “You’re the last person around here who should worry about that.”
Jami was nodding before Katherine finished her sentence. “Right, you’re right. It really helps knowing that they all care so much about me. How can I be lonely knowing that so many people care?” Her voice throughout was soft, and when she finished speaking, she got up and pushed through the door that led back to Bohlen Station.
David watched her go. When the door had settled shut behind her, he surveyed the four people left in front of him.
Only Deborah was looking back at him. “She’s cracking up, David. You need to do something. She named the station after a schizophrenic mechanic in an old science-fiction novel, for Christ’s sake. Doesn’t that worry you?”
“Katherine?” David said. “Fidelis?”
The two doctors looked at each other. David couldn’t tell if some kind of secret physician’s exchange was passing between them. After a moment, both shrugged. “She’s been under a lot of pressure from the beginning,” Fidelis said. “It’s a good sign that she’s still performing all of her work.”
“But barely,” Katherine interjected.
“That’s true of all of us,” said Fidelis. “None of us is working anything like we did our first few months here.”
David stepped back in. “If Jami, or anyone else, starts leaving critical work unfinished, someone tell me right away. I’ll keep an eye out, but the water separator’s a full-time job lately. I need people looking out for each other. None of us can afford to crack. Stay together, people.”
It was the moment to end the.gathering, mission mostly accomplished, crew refocused and given a little momentum to get through the day. Right then David realized he’d forgotten to ask Edgar what he wanted.
Edgar Villareal, interview with Bruce Pandolfo of 700MHz, June 9, 2065:
It’s odd to be the last one alive. When we went to Mars, I think we all figured we were immortal. Along the way we figured out that we weren’t, and realized how awful it would be if we were. Jami couldn’t handle it. David could—he was always better at that kind of thing. I know I was glad to have both of them sopping up most of the attention before it got to me. Remember, I was only 3-1 to be the murdered crew member. Jami, Fidelis, and Deborah were all way ahead of me. People paid more attention to them. And David.
Anyway, I figured half of us would live to be a hundred. Now here I am, ninety next weekend, and I’m the last. And it’s sad that three of us . . . Fidelis’s accident was almost a relief after hearing about David and Katherine and Deborah.
For three days the wind did not blow. Sand and dust settled in gentle drifts around the camp. Fidelis spent each of those three days immersed in his work, keeping himself away from the windows. He wanted to go outside, but he didn’t want to see what he knew would be there.
Blow, wind, he said to himself, and felt creeping unease. Madmen on a dead red heath, that was all of them. Blow, wind. He steeled himself to resist Mars. If the wind would not blow, neither would Fidelis Emuwa go outside. He could outwait the planet. It could not break him.
You’re personifying, he told himself. You’re seeing agency in randomness. That’s what they call paranoia.
Finally he couldn’t stand it anymore. He suited up and went outside into the absurd stillness. The sky was bright and clear. His footsteps crunched as he walked around to the back of the greenhouse, where he’d seen Jami writing in the sand three days before, after David’s meeting in the greenhouse. Writing, brushing it away, writing again.
Between his feet, the words: speaking to the silence.
Fidelis knelt and brushed them away.
The first day nobody called was hard on all of them. Except Jami.
“Twenty-four hours and no ping,” she announced with a broad smile. “It only took a year and a half. Longer attention span than we thought they had, I bet.”
“By about a year,” grumbled Katherine, who Edgar figured was grouchy because Gates hadn’t gotten back to her about her proposal to go into the lava tunnels looking for life other than the scrawny lichen that survived in cracks in canyon walls. He wanted to do it, too, but until today he hadn’t figured Gates would let them. Too much to lose. Now that the data flow from Earth had slowed to a trickle, though, he thought Gates might change its mind. They’d be looking for something to rejuvenate news coverage. Katherine wanted to go, but she also welcomed the relative peace and quiet.
Far as Edgar was concerned, anything that got him out of Bohlen Station and away from Deborah (for weeks now he’d been thinking of her as that bitch Deborah, but he was beginning to get over that) more than justified whatever risks arose. And away from Jami, who had suddenly begun to act like she was on the vid all the time. Of course, all of them were on the vid all the time; they’d agreed to sell “uncut” VR of the voyage as part of their contract with Gates. The feeling Edgar got, though, was that she had started playing a part. She was playing Barbarella the Mission Babe again, only now it was for her colleagues instead of Earthside media.
He wondered if she’d forgotten how to be herself. If somehow the intensity of the news coverage had overwhelmed whatever natural person had existed before they’d all become Marsnauts. Edgar thought back to training and their early publicity junkets. He’d liked Jami. She’d been at ease with everyone, able to joke about herself without seeming to make a point of it. The cameras found her, and the rest of them were grateful—even Edgar, who had once wanted to be an actor. He quickly found that they needed Jami to take the pressure off them. They would all have imploded long ago if she hadn’t done that.
“Now we can go back to being the anonymous discoverers of life beyond Earth,” he said.
Jami flashed him a grin. “Thank God. You doing anything today?”
“Not unless Katherine gets the go-ahead to check out the tunnels.”
“Then come with me. Reactor sensors are due for inspection.”
“Let’s do it.” Anything to get out of here, Edgar thought again.
The Quiet Day, as it became known around the station, turned out to be an anomaly. Apparently people on Earth were still interested. But where before they’d struggled to answer the flood of scientific and media inquiries, now they found that most of their incoming volume was kids looking for help on science projects and lonely postgrads wishing they were on Mars instead of in Ann Arbor or Heidelberg or Jakarta. “It’s official,” Deborah said. “We’re a niche.”
On Jami’s birthday, August 22, she took off on a long solo hike. David almost didn’t let her, but there was only so much he could do, and he settled for making sure that she had twenty-four hours of oxygen and a tested distress beacon. She’s an adult, he said, and if she’s going to kill herself, I can’t do much about it.
The more he watched her, the more convinced he was that she would be better once they’d all gotten on their way home. Surrounded by the empty red immensity of Mars, David thought, memories of Earth started to get a little abstract, like something he’d done once and might someday do again.
Deborah, Katherine, and Edgar were shouting at Fidelis when David came back in from doing the final check on Jami’s suit. He got in among the four of them and calmed things down enough to get a sense of what was going on. It was cold in the station—something wrong with the thermostat—and he could see his breath.
“She’s up to something,” Edgar said. “And he knows what it is.”
“Up to what?” David asked. He caught Fidelis’s eye and tried out his telepathy: Is Edgar okay? Do we have a problem here?
Fidelis looked away from him and said, “She’s having a hard time. This is true. And we have talked about it. She’s entitled to some privacy, though, and I’m not going to just repeat what was said for all of you.”
“If she’s cracking up, it endangers the mission, Fidelis,” Deborah said. Edgar was nodding along with her. “I could give a shit about her privacy.”
“You know she’s been skating on the edge of pathological for months, Fidelis,” Katherine said. “If she’s fallen over, you’re the one who will know, and you can’t keep it from us.” Edgar and Deborah started to join in.
“Let me be clear about something,” Fidelis snapped. The rest of them fell silent; they’d never heard him raise his voice except to laugh. “If I thought Jami was putting the mission in danger, I would of course tell David. I would not just tell whoever wanted to know, and I will not be bullied because you are all anxious. Do not insult me by turning me into a snitch, and do not insult me by suggesting I will not carry out my responsibilities.” He glared at each of them in turn. When nobody said anything, he walked between Katherine and Edgar and went upstairs.
“He’s not telling us everything he knows,” Deborah said.
David waited to see if Edgar or Katherine had something to add. After a pause, he said, “He doesn’t have to. You heard what he said. Do any of us really think that Fidelis Emuwa, of all people, is going to let personal feelings get in the way of his job? Come on.”
Again he waited, and again none of them contradicted him, but David could tell they weren’t convinced.
Gates Corporation communications records, August 22, 2011 (subpoenaed as evidence in the trial of Fidelis Liber Emuwa, David Louis Fontenot, Deborah Ruth Green, Edgar Carlos Villareal, and Katherine Alexandra Yi):
Date: 22 Aug 2011, 14:35:06 GMT
To: Argos PM Roland Threlkeld
From: Tammy Gulyas, Argos Mission Liaison
Re: Argos trouble?
Rol,
David was in touch today. He’s worried about Jami (still, or again) and Edgar (again). Doesn’t think there’s an immediate crisis, but wants to know how much pressure he can put on Fidelis. Jami’s been talking to F. and the rest of the crew thinks he’s holding out on them. D. worried that E. might get violent. Ethical issues are your dept., so I’m shuffling this one off. Vid of David’s call attached.
Next time we need to send an actor along. Fuck brains, fuck weight restrictions. J. might look good, but she’s an engineer. We need someone who can handle celebrity.
TG
Date: 22 Aug 2011, 16:11:53 GMT
To: Tammy Gulyas, Argos Mission Liaison
From: Argos. PM Roland Threlkeld
Re: Argos trouble?
Tammy—58 days to Earth-return liftoff. Sit tight. David’s strung out like the rest of them. Jami’s going to be fine, so is Edgar. Fidelis is a rock. ~R
They all took Labor Day off. It was a gesture, really, since they could take all the days off they wanted. Their scientific objectives were long ago accomplished, and with the launch back to Earth less than six weeks away, Gates had clamped down on discretionary travel and exploration. So they played lots of euchre and went over preliminary checks and tried not to get on each other’s nerves.
Fidelis spent the morning in the common room reading Don Quixote on the table screen. He had been keeping a careful eye on Jami for weeks now, since he’d seen her writing in the sand. She was holding herself together, but he could tell it wouldn’t take much to unravel her. Everyone else in the crew had come to him wondering about her bright brittle smile, the metronomic way she did her work, ate her meals, slept and bathed and spoke. David in particular was worried, and seemed to be carrying some kind of guilt. “First I thought that when the attention went away, she’d settle down. And she did, kind of, but it wasn’t real. Then I started to figure that as launch got closer and the nets started talking about engineering obstacles, she’d perk back up because they’d ask her technical questions, you know? Questions about her area of expertise. Things that make her sound good.”
