TWO STAMPS TO MARS

2009-08-14T00:55:00.000-07:00

"Well," Lee says, working her mouth around a piece of vacuum-packed soy jerky, "it could be worse."

We're standing in the hold. Ariadne hums a one-note tune around us that still, somehow, manages to be off-key. She's got her Service-issue coveralls stripped to her waist, and underneath she looks like what you'd get if you took a whippet and let it get into the protein shakes. Kids on Mars get stuck on hamster wheels from an early age to keep their bones from breaking down in microgravity, and the military cranks that hamster wheel into turbo mode. She still wears her dog tags under the fabric of her shirt, just because she likes to remind everyone that she can kick their ass. Once upon a war ten years ago, she was some sort of SAR field medic, flying down into war zones to go patch up crashed pilots. Before the draft, she raced hoppers down the long red shoulders of Olympus Mons. Real, balls-out commando bullshit. You know.

Me, I'm from Earth. I used to be a communications techie on what Lee likes to call the wrong side of the war. Now the two of us, we fly a mail freighter from the warehouse on Phobos to the surface, and it's not such a bad job. Most weeks, things go on without a hitch. We started working together on a long run from Earth to Mars, which took us about three months in one direction. Three months. Un-fucking-believable. The Postal Service is inordinately fond of old pre-war shit buckets. Every time I go to sleep I expect to wake up to open space.

I kneel beside the body, look for a pulse. Why isn't she doing this? A few centimetres above where I press my fingers into the carotid, there are several thin flesh-coloured circles clustered against each other like some weird skin disease. Derms. Probably some sort of benzo-based sedative. "Nothing," I say. Of course, we both knew that already. Living people don't make angles like that with their limbs. "Overdose, you think?"

"Oh, undoubtably. Fucking junkie."

Even dead, he smells like money. Tourist kid right off of some Luna colony; he might be nineteen at most. He said he wanted to see Mars - really see it, none of that sissy tour guide crap. A little extra cash never hurt anybody, so we told him we'd give him an aerial view in a little bar on Phobos two days ago. It's kind of sad, really. If he'd gone for the sissy tour guide crap, he might've lived.

I get to my feet. Lee and I stand there, for a while, while she masticates furiously. Time passes. "God dammit," I say, "at least act like you care. D'you realize what they'll do to us if they find out? I don't want to spend twenty years in the belt chipping ice off asteroids, thanks."

"It's just an overdose. They can't pin that on us. And if they fire us, then hell, I've been working this job for years. I could stand to have a career change."

I shake my head. Our psych profiles say that we're supposed to be complimentary to each other, to get along, but times like this I fucking hate her. "Not me," I say. "I need this job." I've gone from job to job too many times, and, damn it, I'm forty-six years old. I can't take this shit any longer. Lee's not much younger, but she can't sit still for than an hour, let alone stay on a job for years on end. Settling down, for her, is stagnation.

"Relax. It's not as if we can exactly go to the coppers out here." She presses her lips together, puts her hands in her coverall pockets, and her tone softens. "D'you think he had family?"

"Sure. Everyone's got family," I say. "Too bad he never gave us a surname. Or even his actual first name."

"What do you mean?"

"Lee, no one names their kid Phineas."

"So? Maybe on Luna they do. You know. The richer the kids, the dumber the names." She shrugs. In the hold and in our quarters, rotational gravity is close to Earth norm, so she starts to walk away instead of just flinging herself across the room. "So what, we just dump him out over the Tharsis? Come on, that's not like you."

"I never said I liked it. I'm just saying, it's the only thing we can do that makes any kind of sense. I mean, you want to lug this kid over to Luna and look for his parents? This ship's not built for long hauls, we don't have the fuel, and let me remind you that he's going to smell really, really bad when we get there, and I'm sure his ma isn't going to like patting him on his little maggoty head, assuming that she even exists, because let's face it, the kid was a flake."

"Alright. Okay. Once we make the drop down into atmo, we'll push him out. Just… let's put him into something, okay? Exposure won't exactly make him any prettier."

So we empty out one of the mail bins and put Phineas into it. After we hit atmo, we make an unscheduled detour to a smooth, featureless part of the Tharsis, where we get into our emergency EVAs and hike about a click across the Martian redrock. We'll be digging hard into our reserve tank on the way back, but we can make the trip, no problem.

I suggested burying his personal effects with him, like some old Egyptian pharaoh, for use in the afterlife, but he didn't bring much on board other than some clothes and a toothbrush, and a drug stash which we're both impressed by the size and extent of. You can pack a lot of derms down into a briefcase, if you try hard enough. We decide to hang onto it, you know, just in case we run into Phineas's grandma on a long run some day.

We don't say anything. We left the communications packs on the Ariadne.

In the airlock, later, we have no words for each other. We're not going to talk about Phineas ever again, we've agreed, though I'm sure it'll slip out when we go drinking between runs some time. I can feel his presence there, hovering over my shoulder, in the narrow space between us, and I'm not sure that it flushes out with the thin Martian air. I take off my helmet. After a while, so does Lee. Then she undoes the seals of her gloves and reaches out to me with bare, pale fingers, and I guess our psych profiles are pretty compatible, and it strikes me that, at least in the crappy yellow cast of the glow panels on the walls, she's better looking than I thought -

"Lee -" I say, and then stop. I look at her hand. A thin, flesh-coloured circle sits between index and thumb.

"Here," she says. "It'll make you feel better." She's already pasted one of Phineas's derms onto her own neck and I wonder when she had the time to do it. Then she pulls off the rest of her EVA suit, breaking apart the contained-field magnetic seals, gives me a puzzled look like what are you staring at, and pushes off down the hall, ricocheting off the bulwarks.

I stick the derm behind my ear and start peeling off my own suit. It kicks in almost straight away, a tricyclic with a mild lithium chaser, a warm rush that makes Lee's face in that slanted light pale and fade. I wonder if he did it on purpose. I wonder if this is why. I push off and down towards the cockpit and the warmth crawling across my blood-brain barrier does a good job of keeping thoughts like that out of my head.

After all, I've got work to do.

WHAT THIS IS

2009-08-13T20:02:00.000-07:00

HELLO INTERNET

I'm Jenny.

I live in Toronto and I'm in first-year chem. Sometimes I move words around on a screen and get delusions of grandeur. And then, sometimes, I'll get this really great idea and put those words on the internet.

Comment. Criticize.
Or, you know, enjoy.

stopgap street

TWO STAMPS TO MARS

WHAT THIS IS