“Enough!” Jim shouted, and I could see the fog in his helmet from the discomfort of it all. He grabbed me by the shoulder, and there we stood, far from home, in a place where, if we died, and it was reasonable to suppose we might, it could be decades before they found our skeletons. At last, Jim continued: “You don’t know what goes on in here, Jed! You don’t know what kinds of anguish I feel here. A man’s woe is his own even when he puts it into inadequate words. What happened up there, that night, well, it changed me. But not in the best ways. I feel like I’m breaking apart, because of it all. I feel like I can’t look at myself in the mirror and be sure that I’ll recognize the face that looks back at me. Every day I get a message from my kids, my boys and my little girl, I feel some stirring of such confusion in myself that I… I don’t know if I can… withstand this, Jed, this interplanetary me. My older boys got into a fight at the ice hockey rink yesterday. They didn’t start it, but they had to finish it, and they administered some exemplary kind of knockout blow to the attacker, and each of them was bloodied by the combat. I’m proud as hell of them. But would they be proud of what their father has done? Their father the first gay captain in space? Is what he’s done good for them, good for the home planet? They were the ones who suggested I come here. I did it to try to put the loss of their mother to rest. Did I do the right thing? Is this the right place for the likes of me? NASA can’t get ahold of us more than one day out of seven now, and we have begun forging a colony of our own. Without them. A good thing? Or a bad thing? Faced with these uncertainties, faced with the frailty of the Mars colony, Jed, what do I do about the carnal fire I feel when I think about you? You, Jed Richards. Should I just chase you around in the capsule, grab-assing, when every one of us is in danger of getting scurvy starting sometime next month when the vitamin C capsules run out? Will I still look attractive to you when my teeth start dropping out?
“Every time I have a randy thought, every time I feel that tug, I feel like I’m defaulting on my leadership responsibilities, I feel like I’m thinking only of myself, when I have so much else to think about. Do I have room in my heart for the kind of outlandish behavior we undertook up there, or is that just part of space itself, part of the voyage, not part of life here among the desperate few—”
And then, while he was in the middle of the thought, he tore himself from me violently, and standing some feet away, he flung off his helmet, and I heard the hiss of oxygen, and then there was a groan of such mortal intensity that I wondered if he didn’t rip himself apart from the inside as he did it, whether to wrestle me to the ground or to embrace me I didn’t know, not at first, but I cried out to tell him not to run that terrible risk. Still, there was no choice but to do the same, to remove my helmet. There we were, two oxygen-deprived, frostbitten men who loved each other. Two men who had been driven as far from the dictates of heterosexual civilization as anyone ever had been. All that needed to be done was to accept where we were and what we had between us. Here was my lover on his knees in the Martian desert, clutching my leg and sobbing, driven from all earthly human civilization. The crown so heavy on his fevered brow.
He gasped, “I have lost everything!”
“It’s not so,” I whispered, faint of breath. “We don’t ever have to be together again, if only I can know that you care. It’s enough, Jim. If I just know that we’re in this together, and that I’m not dreaming about what happened. That’s enough. What I want is to feel like I have given myself to something or someone of substance. We can do this together. We can do it.”
He collapsed onto his backside. And as if it would somehow convince him of the seriousness of the situation, he grabbed a fistful of Martian topsoil and watched the orange dust blow free of his glove. Then I helped him to his feet. And then, because we were already in danger from exposure and hypoxia, we put back on the helmets and trudged homeward.
February 11, 2026
The following dialogue has been taking place for ten days or so. On the bulletin board application on our clipboards. I have vacillated about uploading the file because of how incomplete the exchange is, but ultimately, I have decided that it’s a good example of the way life is lived on the Mars colony, as well as being an interesting document of the times, and so I include it today.
GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Dad, I have a little time cuz the homework is done. I had to do a report on women in politics over the last hundred years. Women are making all these great strides because there are more of them in congress and stuff, but I think maybe some of them are making strides if they don’t go into politics. I mean, why would you bother? So, anyway, what’s up on Mars?
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Darling. Just seeing your handle on the computer log makes me want to cry. There’s so much back home I feel like I’m missing. Maybe that’s a defining feature of my time on Mars. Mars is where you go to miss out on things.
GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: You’re not missing much at all! A guy got killed playing X-treme lacrosse last night. A big head injury. And a governor of somewhere resigned after it came out he was trafficking in sex slaves. Someone tried to flatten Armenia with bombs last week. Can’t remember who.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: It’s you who I’m missing. I want to know everything. So tell me how much you’ve grown, what clothes you’re wearing. What the latest fashions are. What young people do about skin blemishes. And can you catalogue some of the slang for me?
GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: I think I’m the same size. I’m hoping that I kind of develop at least some boobs, you know? I mean, I don’t care if I have big gigantic breasts or anything. But at least some. By the way, I am kind of thinking that I might get nipple rings, which is maybe too much information. Mom says no. People are getting nipple rings that glow pale blue. If I pay with my own money from the job, she can’t complain.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: What job?
GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Concessions at the gator refuge. I sit at this little booth. I watch when the little kids get this light in their eyes and come running over to the gift shop. I don’t understand why kids almost always want to see the toy animal as much as the real animal. Anyway, I get a lot of reading done at work. Space travel books. That’s what I like. By the way. The cool expression is “exploding viscera.”
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Space travel books?
GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: The kind where people sail out into space and never look back. Some of them are about Mars, I guess. But Mars, to me, it kind of feels like going to Greenland, or something. It’s not so strange and unusual, because Mars is actually very close. And you’re there. I’m more interested in speed-of-light type things.