We buried him there.
I had a Bible with me on Mars. I understand that many of you think of Bibles as tools for propaganda. Yet I am the kind of person who likes the sweep, the grandeur, and the reverence that I find in the Bible. However, at José’s funeral, I was outvoted. We decided that a reading from the Bible was not a proper Mars First! tradition. We needed, Jim argued (and Arnie and Laurie agreed, especially now that she was beginning to show), to start imagining different and more Mars-centered epics of spiritual literature. We needed myths of origins that began on this place, that bound together this small community of wayfarers. Accordingly, we decided that there would be no reading at all at José’s funeral. Instead, Jim simply asked if anyone had anything they wanted to say. A tradition was born, if out of misfortune.
By now the dust storm had passed us, heading off in a southeasterly direction, so it was a clear day. Warm for Mars. We stood and waited for inspiration.
Finally, Jim said, via walkie-talkie, “José, you were one of the really good people on the mission, because you were one of the people who grew here on Mars. You were a different person, when you died, you were not the man who set out to conquer this unforgiving place, and I have to think that this planet brought that out in you. And while I don’t want to be hopeless at a time like this, my friend, I think I failed you. I think I failed you by not seeing that you had the potential to rise to this occasion. I will miss you therefore, and I will use what you have taught me as I go forward from here. I will not fail the remainder of us. Meanwhile, we’re hoping that you can rest quietly here, and that no one disturbs you for a good million years or so. It’ll be a while before mankind uses up this place, so sleep well, buddy. It should be peaceful.”
I wasn’t the only one looking over my shoulder the whole time, wondering what was next. I turned away during Jim’s remarks, but at the same time I was checking to see if we were being watched. I was wondering when Brandon would turn up next. I was wondering when the rover was going to come over the lip of the crater, when Brandon was going to try to take out the whole bunch of us, spraying us with Taser fire. We stood in the great waste of the planet Mars, uncertain and fearful, and the easiest thing would have been to load back into the Excelsior, assemble the Earth Return Vehicle, and declare an emergency. And yet I just wasn’t ready to give up.
When Arnie and Laurie headed back to the greenhouse, the four of us who remained had a bit of a chat. To try to decide a course of action. The Mars mission, you see, had begun to acquire a certain inalienable organizational structure. According to its own interests. Arnie and Laurie controlled the food. Abu and Steve were in charge of the energy. Jim and I were in charge of infrastructure and the delivery of services. (That meant construction, education, political confederation, and policing.)
The four of us, from power and infrastructure, stood for a minute in the dusk until the sun dipped away and we walked back toward our rovers. It was Abu who opened the subject, the subject we all knew we would have to address. I suppose we were putting it off.
“How should we go about dealing with him?”
“I think we ought to talk to NASA about it, even if we can’t trust them. Let’s see if they give away anything we need to know,” I said.
“And when they don’t give us anything?”
“We fabricate some unlikely plan of attack, leak it to them, see if it gets back to him.”
Jim nodded solemnly. Though it was clear that he was thinking about something else entirely. And Steve, still ghostly, passive, was taciturn too. If it was going to be the drugged-up guy with his arm in the sling who did all the talking, the outcome was liable to be uncertain.
And that reminds me. I forgot to say that Arnie managed to reattach two of my fingers! I didn’t properly re-create the scene after I managed to cross the hold and swing shut the air lock behind Brandon. I didn’t manage to re-create the moment when Jim finally stumbled down the ladder and into the cargo bay, to see blood everywhere and his shipmates laid out on the floor of the hold. The first thing he did was to attempt to revive José, and I can’t blame him for that. There was a lot of hopeless beating on José’s chest.
When it was clear that CPR was not going to work, we placed a tarp over the body in the cargo hold and I showed Jim my hand, I held up my hand, and I asked — if he had time — if he would help me look around the cargo hold. The thumb was easy to find because it was right there on the floor, not far from one of the tires of the ultralight aircraft. And after we turned up the thumb, we worked a little harder for the index finger, which had apparently skidded far across the cargo bay, because it was over by the trash-compacting area of the cargo hold. But what of my middle finger? Kids, we looked high and low, we looked under things and over things, we looked in places where a finger could not have been. And we simply couldn’t come up with the middle finger. I suppose I was in shock from the blood loss, and I would have wandered around looking for my finger indefinitely if Jim hadn’t put a stop to the looking. The only line of speculation that seemed plausible was that the middle finger had somehow left the Excelsior with Brandon. Maybe Brandon had plucked it up from the floor, oozing slightly, and put it into his front pocket. As a little prize that he would be able to put on a necklace of his own manufacture and wear later during his reign of blood.
After all, at the present temperature, the finger would keep for a very long time on the Martian surface. (We were intending to do some experiments to answer this very question, in fact. Since there were no or few microbes on the sterile surface of the planet, it followed that the whole planet was a sort of refrigerator. It would be hard to get meat and vegetable products to Mars, but once you got them here, they’d keep forever.)
In the morning, when the sun came up, after I had another injection, Jim drove me over to see Arnie. I had the thumb and the index finger in a small plastic bag on ice. Not that we needed it. And my hand was wrapped in a great bandage that had severely depleted our stock of gauze on the Excelsior. The Martian dawn was just breaking as we pushed through the air lock into the greenhouse to wake the others. I felt a strange uncertainty about this trip, as if our bad news was so bad that it made the impoliteness of waking Laurie and Arnie even worse. But they were making coffee.
Jim said, “We’re going to need some advanced medicine.”
After a suitable pause he launched into the explanation. I could see Laurie and Arnie pass through various stages of disbelief. I could see the shimmering of Planetary Exile Syndrome in them, in which they did not want to believe. I could feel the heavy metals of Brandon’s rampage seep into the groundwater of the room. When no one quite knew what to suggest, Jim wordlessly laid the plastic bag down on the table in the greenhouse. The club of gauze at the end of my arm hadn’t even really registered for Arnie.
I said, “Do you think you have enough tools here to do a bit of reattachment?”