Once we returned, Laurie brought out the rehydrated meal packets, which we no longer had to serve in pouches, and this alone amounted to culinary liberation. Also, the food was piping hot, and we shared it in portions that were a bit less stingy than during the voyage from Earth. Arnie had also begun testing a regional delicacy, Martian salt, which could be easily mined from the surface of the planet. This we used as a seasoning at table.
“I precipitate it out during my geological tests,” Arnie said, brandishing a rather provisional-looking vial fashioned from scrap metal. “As you know, the water that at one time covered portions of the planet, including, I think, the crater where we are located, was very brackish, like in your most redolent earthly tidal marsh. It makes for a rather smoky table salt.”
José, who was lately mostly unaware of the conversation taking place around him, launched into his repast first, without waiting for Martian grace, a feature of our meals that Laurie had been proposing on a ship’s log we’d all received on our clipboards: a gratitude for the fact we had now been here for a week, were moving toward self-sufficiency, and were less beholden to the pencil pushers in Houston than ever before. José’s very simplicity, his guileless appetites, brightened the mood in the room.
“Oh man, Arnie,” he said, “this salt is, well, out of this world.”
“It isn’t what you’d get back home.”
“Sure it’s sterile?” I asked, before upending the shaker on my own rehydrated chipped beef.
“We’re talking about the uppermost six inches of topsoil,” Arnie said. “There has been no Martian soil sample in the last twenty years that indicated biological compounds. It’s totally safe. Besides, I cooked it some. I’ve been using it for three or four days.”
We even, on the occasion of this first dinner together, harvested a tiny bit of lettuce from the greenhouse. It was the first fresh roughage that any of us had processed in many weeks.
Eventually, the conversation was bound to move in a more serious direction. It was Jim who suggested the topic. He was such a group leader. He was able to forge something from our disparate allegiances and talents so that we might proceed.
“Men and woman of the Mars colony,” he therefore said. “It’s our first night together, on the surface of this new human outpost, and so I do propose a toast.”
Did I say that we were already trying to ferment beverages? I don’t know about the rest of them, but I was eager, once we had touched down, to see if there were items that we could expose to our rather substantial and self-perpetuating colony of yeast, one of the very first Earth organisms to be introduced into the Martian wild (whether NASA wanted it or not). I sort of thought of myself as the Mars colony sommelier, and so that night I served up a little meadlike beverage that I had been working on in the privacy of the Excelsior, with some grain from the storeroom. I can’t say that I had quite perfected it, but the other astronauts were willing to give it a try. Jim raised up a thimbleful of it in a beaker.
“What we did before,” he started in, “is unimportant. How we conducted ourselves on the home planet is unimportant. Our age, our economic station, our beliefs, our gender, our sexuality: unimportant. Our past successes are as unimportant as our mistakes. What we did for the good of the Earth community is no longer as important as what we do for the Martian community. Our mission objectives are changed as of this moment. I would like to try to address our new objectives. As I see it, our mission intends the establishment of a planet free of internecine conflict, selfishness, depletion of natural resources, exploitation of labor. Here there are no laws but the laws of mutual respect and indebtedness. We trade with one another, we don’t practice loans with interest, we don’t recognize an institutionalized religion, excepting the religion of interplanetary exploration, nor do we require laws that regulate private conduct. Our common purpose should be the perpetuation of a new chapter of human history. We believe in the robust health of the Martian colony. And that’s to say that the Red Planet is ours!”
We all raised up our mead, and we swallowed it down, and it tasted a little bit like the cleaning solution that we used for scouring some of the rover’s engine parts. But it had a pretty good kick to it. I could feel, with the acetone bite in my stomach, that I wanted Jim Rose again, as I had done since our brief assignation. Our love moved in me with ever-widening pulsations. In this instance, however, it was enough to watch him and to marvel at his political instincts.
“With that said,” he went on, “I think it would be useful to try to come up with some ideas about how to use what we have here in the coming days. We have the ultralight aircraft, and we are here at the edge of the largest known canyon in the universe. Leaving aside, if we are able, NASA’s expectations, the canyon is worth a look from a scientific perspective. It’s also for us to wonder at. I’d like to entertain suggestions about how we might proceed.”
There was silence for a moment. The clank of metal flatware on military mess kits. José’s head came up from his chow long enough to add to the conversation. His was a non sequitur that I almost immediately wished had gone unreported.
“Hey, Arnie, I’m really feeling like some of my memory is starting to come back.”
“That’s great, José,” Arnie said. “I’m sure you can count on more improvement. And what are you remembering so far? Short-term memories? Are you able to recall distant events from your childhood?”
“I remember the Ownership Projects in Las Vegas,” José said. “I remember when there was the Compulsive Gamblers and Games of Chance Act — that’s what it was called, right? For a while after, the city government constructed those buildings for people who had lost everything. Anyone remember all this?” The other seven astronauts were all but silenced at the wincing nostalgia of José’s reverie. Perhaps he had, once upon a time, sought to conceal the modesty of his origins beneath a haze of acronyms, but not any longer, kids. “You know, my dad was a naturalized citizen, and once he got his papers, he went into the casinos and he didn’t come out. Not for many, many years. I remember when the authorities seized the house that we’d bought. My mother bought it with the money she made working at the Pompeii. There was a foreclosure date, and an eviction date, and then we just had to leave. Anyhow, once we were bounced out, as I’m recalling it, we got a small apartment in the Ownership Projects, which we shared with my uncle and his family. It should have been stifling, and maybe it really was, but the thing I remember is how the electricity was so bad out there that you really could see the stars, from right outside the projects. My cousin, the one who later was shot, we used to lie out on the lawn at night — it was just a patch of loose rock — and look at the stars. And I used to say to him, ‘Not a day past eighteen.’ That was our pact, that we wouldn’t stay in those Ownership Projects a day past our eighteenth birthdays. The place I aimed to go, and this is what I told him, was to those stars.”
“That’s a beautiful story,” Arnie said, patient and gentle. “Do you have any more-recent memories?”
This was a leading question. It probed at the mystery of NASA’s plans. The government’s plans. There were, and had always been, things we didn’t know, and this leading question intimated as much.
“In fact, I had this whole long memory yesterday,” José said. “But I’m not sure if it was a genuine memory. It might have been a daydream or something. It was while I was still in bed. Anyone else here found that their dreams on Mars are a whole heck of a lot more vivid? Anyway, I remember that there was some kind of asteroid or something, before I was born, and this asteroid had plunged onto the Antarctic shelf, and the guys back at NASA were always obsessed with it. In fact, at one point someone let me look at this microscope and see what they had found in the asteroid, and what they had found was this frozen extraterrestrial bacteria. They were really sure that the asteroid was from Mars, was maybe even a part of Mars that had been blasted from the planet somehow. From some asteroid strike. This stuff, the NASA scientists said, was liable to still be on Mars, this bacteria. They were sure about this, in my daydream, and they were beginning to do some experiments to see what kind of properties the bacteria had.”