I happened on the sculptures the way you crest a sand dune and find yourself by the sea, which is to say with anticipation and wonder. The sculptures dotted a half acre of land behind the reactor, and it wasn’t that they resembled the “primitive” art that you found on Earth, so much as they seemed to contain tribal representations of Martians, all fashioned, as Steve said, from metal detritus and silicone found around the site. Abu had used some of the parachute from the landing of the Geronimo, which looked almost like a tattered shroud. The Martians were cloaked in that cloth, and the steady Martian winds blew these creations, luffing and sighing, as if they were sailing vessels carrying Martian brigands. At the far end, where Abu had begun staining the gunmetal gray of the available metals with the reddish gray of Martian soil, so that his recent works looked like the volcanic rock outcroppings around us, he had also inlaid a brace of video monitors from back in the power station, and on these he was running loops of NASA footage of the planet Mars, solar powered. There wasn’t an Earth to be found anywhere in this dolmen circle of his works, just the totemic forms, and the representations of Mars, and the sun; kids, remember that Mars too always went around the sun, and the moons went around Mars, and in that reliable orbiting, Abu’s sculptural installation was much in the style of early-twenty-first-century installation art. But it was also very much connected back to the ancient stonework of the Druidic peoples of Europe. Or at least that would be my art critical take on the whole thing, that it was about what was new and what was old, and so it was something that was meant to be left behind. I spent a while out back considering the sculptures, while the sun was at its highest, and I could see how the shadows were part of the work. The shadows completed the pieces, making transepts and buttresses, implying outstretched limbs. When I had established that one viewing was not enough, I trudged around the power station and back into the Geronimo, vowing to return.
Arnie was busy washing his hands with some water that was probably not at all what we might have referred to, on the home planet, as potable.
“Watanabe?” I asked.
Arnie came up short. Looked at me quizzically.
“I thought he was with you.”
“I thought he was with you.”
“Did you have a look in the power station? Were you in there?”
I suspected Steve Watanabe was not in the power station. I suspected the forklift that they used for transporting the fuel assemblies and so forth would be gone. I suspected that his decision had been arrived at quickly. By necessity.
“What do you make of Abu?” I asked Arnie.
“Blunt force trauma. He’ll either come out of it or he won’t. If he’s in a coma, you know what to do. He’s bleeding in the back of the head. Probably has cranial pressure, all of that.”
Arnie held the rag with which he was drying his hands for a moment and looked at the scrap of warps and wooves, as if it had just been lifted from the face of our lost comrade.
“We’re in trouble here,” he said.
I said, “Hey, while we’re on the subject, I’m having a really hard time sleeping. You know, aches in the spots where the fingers were reattached and phantom limb syndrome from the missing finger; do you think you could—”
For the record, I did have some second thoughts, buried inside, second thoughts about the shape that life on Mars had taken, with its darkness and its callousness. There was a piquancy to Abu’s sculptures, as I had seen them, and it was matched by an absolute lack of compassion everywhere else on the planet. And I was worst of all. I wanted to do better, but I didn’t seem able to do better. Arnie didn’t give my request a second thought. He had morphine syringes on his person. Whether he knew the purpose of my request or not, he didn’t say. At that point I wouldn’t have cared either way.
March 28, 2026
The most prized of Martian sights, if we were to speak of this neglected planet in the terms reserved for tourist attractions, are the traces of unmanned missions past.
The early Mars exploratory missions were like the old masters to us now. Their gear had long since been reduced to buckets of eroded junk. And yet every time we went out into the field, on whatever experiment or mapping initiative, we looked for their tracks. As if seeing some glorified wheelbarrow that the USA or the European Union had sent up would make us less homesick.
It was Laurie Corelli who used to joke about the infamous Mars explorer called Saratoga, which like so many unmanned missions to Mars had gone dark shortly after landing. From the Saratoga, NASA got a few shots of the polar landscape, where the Saratoga was intended to set up shop, and these shots were of gaseous vapors burning off around the rover, as if it were standing in the midst of some heavenly Finnish spa. Immediately thereafter, the Saratoga fell into silence. Another $15 or $20 billion of taxpayer money flushed into the sewage field of aeronautic history. The interesting twist in the tale of the Saratoga, however, was that there had been two occasions, two days later, when the rover actually checked back in. These transmissions broke through the radio silence and the background radiation — for fifteen or twenty seconds. In each circumstance, the rover was far from where it had been projected to be, as if it had somehow developed a will of its own on Mars and was well on its way to a location of its choosing. After these brief, appealing moments of contact, the Saratoga slipped out of range for good. In subsequent years, NASA would occasionally (and only internally) claim to have seen something that might or might not have been a transmission from the Saratoga, or perhaps even a still photo of its dusty chassis. But there was a fair amount of space junk on the planet’s surface now, so who knew really?
It was a software glitch, no doubt, that caused the malfunctioning of the navigational controls on the Saratoga. But doubters believed something else entirely. Laurie Corelli was eager to put forward the notion that the craft had not malfunctioned, or not in the way that NASA believed. The Saratoga, according to Laurie, exhibited what we on Mars now referred to as the problem of the very large computing capacity. Some of our own NASA evaluative machinery had become so large in terms of numbers of microprocessors and amount of raw computing power that this machinery exhibited strange signs of reflexivity, or even primitive stages of consciousness. I could point you in the direction of various theorists of artificial intelligence for more illumination on this subject.