Fourth planet from the s.., p.27
Fourth Planet from the Sun, page 27
ROD SHAVER’S FORUM, July 30, 2010:
Is Deborah Green a lesbian? Is she having an affair with Katherine
Yi? Where does Edgar Villareal come into it?
COSMO0OMSOC>AII of you people are ignoring the most important thing.
GODSAVENGER>Wait and see. Not all of them will return. God will exact his justice.
LUVJAMIXOX> Justice?
GODSAVENGER>They knowingly brought a sodomite with them. Who knows how many of the crew she’s corrupted by now? Do you think God will stand by and allow this to happen?
THEBEAMINYROWN>No real Christian takes this kind of crap seriously.
CHARIOT>When they come back, it won’t matter whether they’re gay or straight or what color or anything. What they bring back will destroy all of our petty disagreements, destroy religion.
GODSAVENGER>You’ve all had your chances.
After all the time they’d spent looking for water, it was almost an anticlimax when they found the lichens in crevices on the sunny sides of Valles Marineris channels. Edgar and Deborah were conducting a hydrological assessment of a series of collapses in a canyon wall, and right before they were due to wrap everything up, she leaned over and said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“What?”
“I think this is lichen.”
He went over to look, and it looked like lichen to him, too, worked into the seams of individual rocks that had broken away from the canyon wall. They took a number-of samples and went back to the rover, wondering when it would hit them that they were the first people to discover life outside Earth.
Back in the lab, Katherine took the samples and ran some quick tests. “Sure enough,” she said. “Lichen. I’m going to sequence the algae and pipe it back on the hotline.”
That night, they were a little more boisterous then usual around the dinner table. David cracked a bottle of Laphroaig he’d been saving for a special occasion, and they toasted each other. “But did we find any water?” Jami cracked, and laughed a little too loudly at her own joke. Of course they all knew there was water—they could see traces of it wherever they looked—but their evidence of life was quite a bit more convincing than their evidence of water. Gates would be happy for the good PR, but their expectations were more geared toward long-term financial viability. And everyone at the table knew how expectations were beginning to oppress Jami.
InkStainedWretch.Com’s Headline Search, August 30, 2010:
LIFE ON MARS!
Life on Mars
Life on Mars Questioned
Critics Question ET Claims
Wait And See on Life Claims, Experts Say
Mars Life Could Be Native to Earth, Scientist Says
Biotech Stocks Volatile on Mars Life Claims
EBONY FREYTAG, MSNBCNN: So you’ve discovered life on another planet.
JAMI SALTER: Well, I haven’t personally. It was Edgar and Deborah.
EDGAR VILLAREAL: It was Deborah.
EF: Deborah Green, you’re the first person to set eyes on alien life. How’s it feel?
Deborah Green: Exciting. It’s humbling. I’m not sure any of us have really gotten our minds around it yet.
EF: Jami, tell us how it happened.
JS: I wasn’t there. You should really ask Ed and Deborah.
EF: We’ll get the science from them later, don’t you worry. But our viewers want to know what it was like.
JS: I can tell you it wasn’t like I thought it might be. There we were, on Mars, with Martian life in our lab, and it was wondrous, but . . . well, we had a drink, toasted ourselves, danced around the campfire a bit and went to bed.
EF: There’s a lot to do tomorrow, isn’t there?
JS: Always. Always a lot to do tomorrow. So I should sign off here and let you talk to Deborah and Ed.
EF: I think we’ve about used our bandwidth, unfortunately. We’ll get the science from the nets; I’m sure Deborah Green and Edgar Villareal will be only too happy to tell us their stories. Talk to you next time.
“Well, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, should we?” Edgar said when they’d broken the link.
Don’t get angry, Deb told herself. You knew this would happen.
She kept her temper, but only just. Eileen, she thought. My little sister, tuning in to hear about her big sister who discovered life on another planet.
And getting Jami Salter.
“Sorry, Deborah,” Jami said, and that was the worst of it; she was such a fundamentally decent person, and had the grace at least to be screwed up by the relentless attention focused on her. Still . . .
Ping.
“Fuck it, never mind. Why don’t you get that? It’s for you,” Deborah said, and didn’t think she’d snapped. “I discover life on Mars, they want to talk to you about it. That’s how it works. We’ve known that for a while.”
“That’s just Ebony,” Jami said. “You’ll have all the tech nets after you.” She laughed, short and bitter. “God knows they’re not interested in anything I’m doing.”
Ping.
Deborah exchanged a quick glance with Edgar, saw that they were thinking the same thing. Jami upset because she wasn’t being recognized? She was an engineer; nobody ever recognized engineers unless the bridge fell down. And she was a pilot, and nobody ever recognized the pilot until the crash.
“Public figuring’s a bitch,” Edgar said. Deborah was startled. She could see Jami was too. Edgar, saying bitch?
They laughed, Edgar at his joke and the two women at him. Public figuring.
Ping.
HotVegas, August 29, 2010:
Odds that lichen is most sophisticated life on Mars: 175 to 1
Odds that the “discovery” is a hoax: 1 to 1
Odds that Mars lichen descended from Earth species: 4 to 1
Odds that Earth lichen descended from Mars species: 5 to 8
Odds that human beings are descended from Mars lichen: 7 to 5
Odds that all six Argos crew members survive the mission: 7 to 1
ROD SHAVER’S FORUM, August 29, 2010: Is it real? Does it matter?
CHARIOT>Of course they discovered life. Does anybody out there seriously think they weren’t going to?
THEBEAMINYROWN>Does anybody out there seriously think they’d let us believe they hadn’t? Come on. Gates needs this trip to pay off. Water’s one way; ETBOs are another. And let’s not forget that Gates has a piece of all vids, interviews, even books on all the crew. When D. Green talks to Scientific American, creds flow into Gates accounts. No way they were going to let an opportunity like that go by.
COSMO0OMSOC>So you don’t think they found anything?
CHARIOT>Of course they found something.
THEBEAMINYROWN>I don’t know whether they did or not. It’s possible. I’m just saying that we were going to be told they’d found something whether they did or not.
COSMO0OMSOC>But it’s lichen, man. Not like little green men or a big monolith or something.
THEBEAMINYROWN>The ways of Gates are devious and subtle, amigos. Just keep your eyes open, is all I’m saying.
The sequence came back from the Gates database with three beautiful words: NO SPECIES MATCH.
“Life on Mars,” Edgar breathed. For a while all of them stood around the sample containers watching the brown lichen.
Ping.
Ping.
Ping ping ping.
“We’re watching brown lichen, people,” David said presently.
InkStainedWretch.Com’s Headline Search, August 31, 2010:
ARE WE ALL MARTIANS?
Panspermia Gets New Lease on Media Life
Humankind Not Descended from Martians, Pope Says
Society for Christian Medicine Floats Argos Crew Quarantine Results Still Not Definitive About Mars Life
Lichen: Symbiotic Explorer
They spent the next two months absorbed in the problem of the lichen: where it grew, what could kill it, what made it grow, whether it performed the same ecological function on Mars that it did on Earth. Gates, of course, made sure that they spent most of their time looking for water, but hell, they’d found the original lichen while looking for water; it wasn’t that hard to make one activity look like the other.
And they found water, too.
Again, Deborah was the lucky party. Late on a surveying mission, irascible from the grit of Martian dust in her underwear and her eyes and her teeth and her socks, she’d said to herself: Fine. One more sweep. Fill out one more grid. Then back to base and I’m not going out for a week. A fucking week. No more peroxide taste, no more dust in the crack of my ass. Seven days.
Something rumbled below her feet.
She was forty meters from the lip of a canyon wall that dropped something like three hundred meters to a titanic jumble of fallen rock. Edgar was about a hundred meters away from her. Both of them dropped their instruments and ran toward the edge.
Deborah threw herself on her stomach and scooted forward until her head was hanging over the sheer drop. Below her, mist swirled above the rockfall at the bottom of the canyon. Carbon dioxide; they saw that all the time. They’d even seen water mist once in a while. Never water in commercially useful quantities, though. Never until this huge beautiful plume that came exploding out of the canyon wall two hundred meters below her pounding heart, eclipsing the carbon-dioxide mist in a thick fog of sublimating water.
She was screaming into her mike, and she screamed louder when the vapor cloud rose up to envelop her. The world went white, and Deborah opened her mouth and let the frustration of the past two months chase the joy, the never-to-be-repeated joy of this moment, out of her mouth and through her mask and into the thin wet Martian air.
“Deborah! Deb, Jesus! Deb! You there? Come in, Deb!”
“Toggle your cams to me!” she shouted. “God, look at this!”
She heard their exclamations as they saw through her cam. Water beaded on her mask, held for a moment by her body heat before it sublimated away. Something gripped her hand, and Deborah started before she realized it was Edgar, talking to her on their private channel: “You again, Miz Green. Lucky I have you around.”
She squeezed his hand through their bulky gloves, and in that moment a ridiculous thought flashed through her mind: Oh, God, I’d better be sure to shower before tonight or we’re going to scrape each other raw. She laughed out loud, and Edgar joined in. Over their mikes they heard the rest of the crew shouting, clapping each other on the back, calling them to come back in and start the celebration.
HotVegas, November 9, 2010:
Odds that Argos I crew will suffer infection from Martian life: 1 to 4
Odds that Martian infection will kill Argos I crew member: 7 to 2
Odds that Argos I crew will carry dangerous microbes back to Earth: 2 to 5
Odds that all six Argos crew members survive the mission: 8 to 1
Late in the night, Edgar asleep beside her, Deborah remembered stepping out of the airlock into Bohlen Station and thinking as she did that she would really have to find out why Jami had suggested they call the station that. A character in a book, Jami had said.
Katherine had been there inside the airlock door with a puzzled expression on her round face. “Again,” she said. “You, again.”
Yes, Deborah had wanted to say. Me again. But the look on Katherine’s face was so pained; she had wanted very badly to discover life on Mars herself, or at least to pronounce life absent, and then her grand moment was usurped by a geologist. Who then found water, too. It was all a little much, Deborah thought.
“It’s your work they’re going to remember,” she’d said to Katherine. “You’re the one who did the sequence and all that. I was just in the right place.”
“Thank you,” Katherine had said. “Thank you for believing that.”
ROD SHAVER’S FORUM, November 8, 2010:
Ghoulies and Ghosties and . . .?
SOCKPUPPET446>You heard it here first: one of them’s already sick. They’re going to cover it up, but watch and see if they all come back. They won’t.
THEBEAMINYROWN>Hooray, Shaver’s paranoids are alive and well.
SOCKPUPPET446>Whatever, beam. You wait until they come back and spread it to you.
CHARIOT>Whatever it is, it couldn’t be worse than the shit we’ve already got. I’ll challenge any Martian microbe to ten rounds with HIV3.
LUVJAMIXOX>Funny sh!t coming from u, chariot.
CHARIOT>What they’re going to bring back is much much stranger than we can imagine.
InkStainedWretch.Com’s Headline Search, November 9, 2010:
WET MARS
Mars Crew 2 for 2
Gates Stock Up 37 Percent on Water News
GM, Airbus, Vishnu Ready Mars Plans
“Life Is Interesting, Water Makes Money,” Says Chair of NSF
Ebony Freytag Sued Over Naked Jami Vid—Fake?
Ping.
It was never so good again. Once they’d found life, found water, basked in their accolades, there was still nearly a year to spend on Mars and seven months of sandpapering each other’s nerves on the voyage home. The Gates scientific crew thought up more than enough experiments and missions to keep them busy, but their real work was done. They had established that Mars held both life and enough water to justify colonization. Already a dozen Mars colonies were moving from pencil-sketch imagining to nuts-and-bolts reality. In ten years, Mars would be utterly changed.
“We’d better enjoy it while we can,” said David. “Who knows if we’ll get to come back?”
“Would you want to?”
Jami’s question surprised him. They were running the latest in an endless series of inspections of joints, hoses, bearings, and seals—anything that could be eroded by peroxides or clogged by dust. Which was to say, everything. They’d taken to doing it in pairs, and when it had become apparent that the pairs were rubberstamping each other (after Katherine and Fidelis had both missed a badly corroded seal that then blew, freezing the station’s water supply), they’d taken to sending out pairs—who weren’t getting along with each other. This meant that Fidelis hardly ever got inspection duty, since everyone liked him.
It also meant that David and Jami were at last going to have to get out into the open whatever it was that had been hanging between them since they’d been anointed Argos I media darlings. Or so, they both knew, Fidelis was hoping.
So here we go, David thought. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I would.”
Jami looked at him for a long time. The Sun was setting, the Martian landscape settling from golds and reds back into evening browns. There was enough dust on her faceplate that David couldn’t see her expression.
“I bet you would,” she said eventually.
Ebony Freytag’s show became the crew’s guilty pleasure. On a Tuesday in December, they watched as she devoted an entire show to random things her audience wanted to know about the Argos crew. Did they lose a lot of weight in space? Were they more religious than when they’d left? What were they really doing?
And why, someone asked, was everyone so heated up about David Fontenot when Fidelis Emuwa was so gorgeous?
“I guess Fidelis is a pretty good-looking guy,” David said.
Katherine snorted. “Why do we watch this garbage? Just because they want us to be a sideshow. Why do we let them?”
The two of them were sitting in the common room. Fidelis came down from the dorm level. “Are we a sideshow?”
“When was the last time we got a call from someone other than Gates about either exobiology or water?”
David got up for a cup of tea. He wanted to stay to the side of this discussion. After his exchange with Jami a few days before, he’d tried to be more sensitive to the mood of the crew, and what he’d seen thus far wasn’t encouraging. Holiday blues, he thought; all of us get a little crabby around the New Year. He hoped that was all it was.
Deborah came in from the direction of the lab. “Another day, another goddamn revolutionary discovery about Martian geological history. I’m sick of it.”
“Maybe we should take a couple of days off,” David said, and then wished he hadn’t spoken. Where were Jami and Edgar? Edgar was probably tinkering with something, cleaning out a ball joint somewhere or changing the rover’s battery terminals. Jami, who knew? Jami was doing her Martian Bedouin-mystic thing somewhere nearby. She had enough to do keeping station computer equipment up and communicative, but recently she’d developed a tendency to wander off once things had reached a bare minimum functionality. Katherine and Deborah were getting sharp about it.
HotVegas, February 11, 2011:
Odds that one or more Argos crew members has attempted suicide: 4 to 1
Odds that one or more Argos crew members will attempt suicide: 2 to 3
Odds that all six Argos crew members survive the mission: 6 to 1
David gathered the Argos crew in the station greenhouse. All of them liked it there. It was warm, it smelled good, it wasn’t brown. “I think we ought to have a chat. All of us.”
Everyone settled into a rough circle. David looked around the group, saw that Deborah wasn’t next to Edgar and Jami was between Fidelis and Katherine. So they hadn’t arranged themselves according to cliques. That was good. “Katherine,” he said, “I know this is more your territory—”
“Fidelis is more of a psych guy than I am,” she said. “I was a surgeon.”
He let the interruption pass, then plunged ahead. “I’m concerned about our collective well-being here.”
The wind kicked up, rattling dust and gravel against the greenhouse walls.
“So am I,” said Fidelis. David was looking at him just before he spoke, and he saw Fidelis look quickly at Jami and then away. Worried about Jami? he wondered. Or is Fidelis worried about himself, and Jami’s the reason?
“I think we’re all worried,” Katherine said. “We’re on another planet, halfway through a three-year mission. It’s lethal and ugly outside, and we’re all sick of looking at each other, so inside isn’t much better. All of this was in the mission prep. We knew it would happen.”
