2022 AbSciCon Creative Science Writing Contest
First Place in Short Stories, Fiction
“Pinpricks” by Margaret Weng
INTRODUCTION
They came to Mars with good intentions. My mother came with seeds, dreaming of a densely laden orchard on the orange earth. Others came as builders, to stretch the limits of plastic and steel. They were obeying the impulse of their species: to survive and spread, to spread and then survive. They wanted to sink their foundations into virgin earth, land unsoiled by human touch. They came with millions of dollars of funding, years of research, and the confidence of experts.
They had trained for months in the desert east of Los Angeles. My mother kept a journal, recording the difficulties of their small steel bunker, their lack of privacy. At the end of their training, they had gone to a local restaurant to celebrate. Tired and smelly, they had piled into booths and benches, not looking at each other. “Where are you all coming from?” the waiter had asked, stacking laminated menus at the end of the table. “Mars,” my father had said, twirling a sugar packet between his fingers. And everyone had smiled.
They had all made sacrifices. My mother, for example, had left a tenure-track job at the University of California Davis. My father had been a mechanical engineer at a top aerospace company. They had families—parents, siblings, cousins. Yet they could not shake their secret restlessness, the voices that urged them away from known comforts toward the promise of better discoveries.
They came with a sort of fatalistic optimism. Earth, the great experiment, was failing. The seas were dying and the fish had become poisonous—their eyes hazy, their scales hardened, and their stomachs full of microplastics. On Mars there were no fish to kill or forests to raze, no life at all that any mission had detected. On Mars there were no colonial nations, no race or class, just the small nucleus of a new society.
When the mission launched, they were reasonably certain that they could live out their lives on the Martian surface. They carried supplies that would sustain them for twenty years, twenty-five if rationed, after which they hoped to be completely self-reliant. Earth communications were provided from a surprisingly low-tech radio device. As a child, I used to speak to mission control in Houston, turning the dials and not believing anything really existed beyond the darkness until voices came through the speaker with a sharp crackle.
The crew was a pilot program of only fifty people. Children were an ethical question. Any children born on Mars would stay there indefinitely, certain to inherit an uncertain and hostile world.
Of course, under the loneliness of an orange-and-black sky, with the sharp rasping cough of sandstorms against the walls of the compound, some turned to the comfort and familiarity of sex. Survive and then spread, spread and then survive. My father found my mother in the greenhouse while she was marking growth charts. He thought it was endearing that she had a smudge of dirt on her left cheek despite the sterility of her white lab coat. He thought it was unnerving but beautiful that she had recorded birdsong to play in the greenhouse, so that the plants wouldn’t have to grow in silence. He pretended there was a problem with the irrigation mechanism that only he could fix, which required him to be in the greenhouse for long hours tinkering with stretches of pipe while my mother walked up and down the rows, reading the undersides of leaves like a language.
When I was born, the rest of the crew tried their best to ignore it. The compound was no place for a child: it was a scientific research station, meant for serious work. The wind outside was empty, not the wind of the Mojave with its warm insect hum. I crawled through the severe hallways and played with strange lost things: stray Post-its, silver lugnuts, raw rice from the bags in the storeroom. Rice was a non-renewable resource: the starch we grew and ate most often was potatoes, which required the least amount of processing. My mother’s one concession to extravagance was the orchard where she grew oranges, apples and pomegranates. The ceiling was clear and let in the light. At sunsets, she held me on her lap to watch the blue flash. “On Earth, sunsets are red,” she told me, but I couldn’t imagine it. Nor could I imagine cities, houses like our compound arranged across the landscape for miles and the people moving between them, crowds of people, more than a thousand, flowing down the roads in their cars and bicycles and buses and trains that I had only read about in stories.
MATERIALSANDMETHODS
The ship carried twelve oxygen recyclers, to be installed throughout the compound. The material for the walls was an ultralight alloy. The hold was filled with cans of insulation and sprayable concrete to build the floors and foundations. Being lightweight was key. Lightweight and foldable. Each gram of material brought aboard cost $2,300 in fuel. Each astronaut was given a small quart-sized pouch for personal belongings, which had to weigh no more than one pound. The astronauts lived in the landing pod until they were able to build the compound. It was almost a year before it was fully habitable.
There were, of course, miles and miles of pipe. The pipe was compressible, but even so it took up a quarter of the hold. Pipes were necessary to transport things like water, gases, waste. A heating solution was carried by special pipes through the walls and ceiling to help insulate the buildings. It was the pipes, not the walls, that really kept the astronauts alive: walls, no matter how radiation-shielded, were useless against the freezing and airless dark.
Among the things my mother brought in her quart-sized bag: an e-reader, filled with as many titles as she could fit. A map of the Earth. A pair of earrings that had been her mother’s. The business card for a barbeque joint that read HOWARD’S, Open Nine to Five, Hwy 65, Lubbock, Texas.
Among the things my father brought: A Rubik’s cube. A letter from his sister, which he never let me open. A page from an engineering textbook. A picture of a young boy, which could have been himself.
RESULTS
My mother taught me in the free time before dinner: math, science, Martian geography. I learned the names of valleys people had once thought were seas, canyons mistaken for alien canals. When my father needed to venture Outside, my mother and I stood on the other side of the airlock chamber, listening to his breathing as he strapped himself into the EVA suit. He was gone for ten or twelve hours at a time, performing maintenance on the compound or helping one of the scientific teams with an experiment. He would show me the routes the night before, explaining what he had to do. He took me into the viewing room as another Martian day crept into the horizon, pointing at the miles of shifting pinkish sand before us.
When I was fifteen, people started to show signs of sickness. It was the soil. My mother’s crops had been planted in a mixture of Martian gravel and fertilizer. They discovered that the gravel was home to an extremely slow-growing nanoarchaea, an ancient relative to Earth, thought to have diverged soon after the last universal common ancestor. It had persisted through the long Martian winter by doing what no life had done before: living in geologic time. Some cells were estimated to be nearly a million years old, their cytoplasm thick as maple syrup and filled with DNA stabilizers. The addition of nitrogen fertilizer had stimulated a bloom of these nanoarchaea in the greenhouse soil, unfurling in the dark. Over the years, they had colonized our bodies, settling in the stomach, the bloodstream, the liver. Spreading below the surface like a bruise.
By the time we understood this this my mother could barely stand, her body riddled with tumors. She sat beneath her trees and ate pomegranates. I peeled them for her and handed her the seeds, her fingers as fragile as eggshells.
Officially, the greenhouse had to be abandoned. Most of the seed stock was gone. They would have to start again on what had been saved in the storerooms. The others blamed my mother. They didn’t understand why she had planted an orchard when vitamin C tablets worked just as well. They thought she had probably been careless with the soil screenings. They had always known she would be the weak link, a woman prone to sentimentality in her science, who brought sex and children to their perfect world.
Some of us got sicker, while others recovered. My father and I survived, but more than half the astronauts died. We couldn’t bury the bodies because the Martian ground was too hard. We built a cairn for them, beneath the branches of my mother’s trees, out of basalt rocks gathered from Outside. Then we took down the outer walls of the greenhouse to let the ferocious atmosphere reclaim it all.
DISCUSSION
The others began to talk of leaving.
Of course, it was impossible to leave. The technology did not exist. They had figured out so much before this trip. They had invented lighter and stronger materials, new food-storage techniques. They had consulted with a psychologist on what color to paint the walls. They had trained for starvation, for disaster, for stranding and for crashing, but they had not created a rocket that could both land on and lift off the Martian surface. This was a complex engineering problem and the astronauts hadn’t wanted to wait for it to be solved. Resupply ships could still launch from Earth if they needed anything. Such was their confidence, their desperation.
They radioed for help every night. At first, it was a request for a resupply ship: medical supplies, building supplies, garden soil. More food to supplement the dwindling stocks. But the radio was silent. No reply came from Earth. I wasn’t as panicked as the others. In my heart, I had always known that the cities my parents talked about were made-up words. My father spent a day inspecting the radio equipment and determined it was in perfect working order. The radio messages grew more urgent. Eventually, they set it to constantly broadcast SOS, like castaways fanning the smoke of a signal fire. After a month of no contact, in the middle of the night, my father shook me awake. It was time, he said, to use the Telescope.
He helped me suit up quietly. We didn’t want anyone to ask where we were going. There were a lot of factions forming in the compound and alliances were tenuous, mistrust deep-seated. One group had seized control of the storeroom and insisted on measuring out every portion of food. Still, supplies were dwindling. My father turned the handle of the airlock and we stepped Outside.
My feet were protected from jagged rocks by the thick layer of memory foam in the soles of my boots. We climbed the first hill without speaking and set out across the meteor-speckled landscape, keeping an eye out for hidden craters. The ground was silvered by the light of the two pale moons, Phobos and Deimos. The low gravity made uphill portions easier but downhill harder, as I had to fight to keep my feet on the ground.
After about an hour’s walk, when my oxygen tank needle had begun to dip slightly below the three-quarter mark, my father stopped abruptly and said, “We’re here.”
I looked behind me. The compound had disappeared behind a ridge, so that we seemed entirely and terminally alone. In the distance I could see the hazy outline of Olympus Mons, which swallowed the horizon. Before us was another building made of the same shiny silver material as our compound. My father took a set of old-fashioned keys from the pocket of his EVA suit and with great difficulty inserted one into the door.
“This is the Telescope,” he explained to me as we stepped inside. “It was created so that we could monitor Earth. Only a few people here know about it—it was top-secret, funded by the military. There’s also a secure radio line to Earth that’s always operational.”
He flipped on a bank of lights and I blinked as my eyes adjusted. The room was empty and cold, sheltered by glittery chrome walls. In the middle of it sat a huge telescope pointed at an opening in the ceiling. My father pointed at a second set of doors that had a familiar airlock symbol on the side.
We stepped in and cycled through the airlock. My father explained that you could see the readout from the telescope on the computers in this room, as well as use the secure radio channel. There were enough emergency rations to last years, and a supply of weapons and ammunition.
He crossed over to a desk and booted up a big bank of computers. He tapped away for a few minutes.
Then his voice got very quiet. “Look,” he said to me.
I looked over his shoulder at the image onscreen. Years ago, my parents had explained how the continents of Earth were outlined by tiny pinpricks of light, a delicate lacework of highways and towns. Now all we saw were swirling clouds moving across the face of the planet. It was night on Earth but there were no lights, the oceans and continents nearly indistinguishable. “Where are they?” I asked him.
“Gone,” he said, reading lines of coded messages on the screen. I asked him to translate the messages for me but he refused. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head. He was a person who believed in outcomes, the blessed ignorance of facts. He would say to me often: It doesn’t matter what you think. It’s what you do that counts. “It doesn’t matter which country invaded, whose resources they wanted, who set off the first bomb. They’re gone,” he said, “and we’re here.”
I went silent. My father started to make plans. What we would bring back to the compound, how we would survive. Later the colonists, led by my father, emptied their quart-sized pouches into a controlled burn in the communal living space, the only fire that has ever been allowed in the compound. They all pledged to forget Earth, to set new points of reference, to recalibrate their standards for their new world. This had been their mission after all, the mission of no return. Instead of building a new society, they were now composing a eulogy. There was never another child born in the compound and there never will be. Before the bags were burned I took my mother’s e-reader. I wanted to know what she had left, why she had come.
Eons from now, the cairn where we buried my mother will stand untouched, her body frozen to the planet’s surface. On Earth, the shifting tectonic plates will do their work. Tenuous weeds will rebuild the soil, new rivers will carve canyons through the lace of city streets, rubbing away our mark in a geologic blink. As though we had never been there. As though our species had been born and died on the Red Planet, which holds our mistakes and memories forever.
2022 AbSciCon Creative Science Writing Contest
Updated: October 5, 2022