How to Mars

Praise for How to Mars

"Ebenbach explores science fiction for the first time in this clever novel focused on a one-way trip to the red planet. Financed by an eccentric billionaire with funding via reality television, six scientists emerge from a ‘Survivors’ gauntlet of seemingly meaningless tests . . . The poignancy of the impossible pregnancy is the Bradbury touch, the reality show framework carries fingerprints of Douglas Adams, and the handbook provides a Vonnegut-esque struggle with the paradoxes of the human condition. How to Mars is Andy Weir’s The Martian (2014) infused with poetry in a superbly concise package."

—Booklist

"David Ebenbach’s new novel wittily dismantles the classic space adventure story. In it, the first colonists on Mars struggle not only with the technical and existential challenges of living on another world, but also with much more familiar conundrums: boredom, cabin fever, a crazy coworker, an unplanned pregnancy, corporate incompetence. Funny and wonderfully inventive, How to Mars is equal parts an absurdist cautionary tale and a warm-hearted exploration of those things, good, bad and indifferent, that make us human."

—Emily Mitchell, author of Viral Stories

"Six Marsonauts must survive on the red planet after their reality TV show is canceled in this delightfully unconventional novel. Two years after having been chosen to receive one-way tickets to Mars for a lifetime of research—all while living under constant surveillance for TV—six scientists are finding life undeniably monotonous, especially since their show was canceled because of low ratings . . . But when Jenny, the astrophysicist, realizes she’s pregnant after having begun a romantic relationship with Josh—although the Destination Mars! Handbook repeatedly stresses that sex is strictly forbidden—the small community must come together to resolve the looming issues associated with welcoming a newborn into their cramped habitat . . .The story has a strong sense of whimsy, but Ebenbach also creates depth by exploring issues like engineer Stefan’s feelings of estrangement and violence and Jenny’s guilt over her sister’s suicide years earlier. A poignant examination of what it means to be human."

—Kirkus

Praise for David Ebenbach

Praise for The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy

Ebenbach is more at home in the minefield of ambiguity than most of us are in our houses.

—Roy Kesey, author of Any Deadly Thing and Pacazo

A brilliant, original, and illuminating book!

—Stephen O’Connor, author of Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

Praise for Miss Portland

Ebenbach delivers an absorbing, suspenseful story of emotional depth and complexity.

—Fiction Southeast

A complex, intimate, and deeply humane portrait of a person whose experience of the world is both alternate and poignantly familiar.

—Foreword Reviews

How To Mars

David Ebenbach

Also by David Ebenbach

Novels

Miss Portland (2017)

Collections

Between Camelots (2005)

Into the Wilderness (2012)

The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy and Other Stories (2017)

Non-Fiction

The Artist’s Torah (2012)

Poetry

Autogeography (2013)

We Were the People Who Moved (2015)

Some Unimaginable Animal (2019)

HOW TO

MARS

David Ebenbach

TACHYON

SAN FRANCISCO

How to Mars

Copyright © 2021 by David Ebenbach

This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher.

Cover and interior design by Elizabeth Story

Author photo copyright © 2021 by Rachel Gartner

Tachyon Publications LLC

1459 18th Street #139

San Francisco, CA 94107

415.285.5615

www.tachyonpublications.com

[email protected]

Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

Editor: Jaymee Goh

Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-356-9

Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-357-6

Printed in the United States by Versa Press, Inc.

First Edition: 2021

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Rachel and Reuben,

the only stars I need.

Dear Reader,

Thank you so much for purchasing this book. We hope you enjoy it.

Please absolutely do not share, reproduce, post, or resell this e-book. Piracy is illegal. This book is protected by international copyright law; all rights are reserved without the express permission of the author and the publishers.

Most importantly, piracy keeps authors from getting paid. It also keeps publishers from putting out more great books like this.

If you have any questions about copyright, or if you think this copy was pirated, please immediately contact us at [email protected].

Thank You,

Tachyon Publications LLC

1459 18th Street #139

San Francisco, CA 94107

415.285.5615

[email protected]

Table of Contents

Prakt Means Splendor

What You Can’t Bring With You

Team Orderly Mars

How to Organize Yourselves

The Interaction of Weight and Light, or: Birds’ Holiday

The Patterns

What You Can’t Do (Part One)

Game Night with the O’Marses

Pregnancy as a Location in Space-Time

How to Deal with the Unknown

We Are All in Tents

There Are Owls in the Moss

Ghost Martians at the Baby Shower

The Phenomenon of Event Horizon Recurrence

The Patterns

On Chaotic Terrain

Welcome to Your Machines

To Think About Something

What You Can’t Do (Part Two)

Apples

What You Can’t Do (Part Three)

The Block Universe Theory of Newborns

They Called Her Able

How to Use this Handbook

Afterword

Book Group Question

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Prakt Means Splendor

This is how I find out Jenny is pregnant on Mars.

Do you want to go outside? Jenny says. It’s just after lunch, which was freeze-dried Reubens. She doesn’t say anything more specific than outside, even though now we have names for this red ridge and that red valley and red-orange Mt. Nearby over there and the various piles of red rocks and even the various scattered dead landers and rovers from old missions, which are landmarks and which we call by the names of the missions, even though some of them had silly names like Undertaking and Beagle and Optimism. But Jenny just says outside. In some sense, even after more than two years, this is still our schema of the planet: there’s inside, which is where everybody is, and there’s outside, which is where nobody is.

Sure, I eventually say.

Jenny nods. It doesn’t bother her that it has taken me a while to answer. We have two speeds here: Slow and Slooooooooooow. Well, three speeds if you count Something is on Fire, but that’s rare.

We put on the suits—one leg, two legs, et cetera. Roger and Nicole look up from their tablets and watch us get suited up, because us putting on the suits is the big game in town at the moment. Trixie is sleeping in the bunk dome. I think Stefan is on the toilet. Anyway, we put the suits on, including Jenny tucking her brown curls into her helmet, and then the audience goes back to its tablets and we go to the airlocks and out.

You know how they call Mars the red planet? Well, that’s because it’s red there. Like, you go outside and you see red. Red to the east, red to the west. Red north, red south. In fact, the dust gets everywhere, so inside is red, too. Though actually, we have a sort of simmering debate among us about just how red versus just how orange the planet is, but we try to keep it simmering rather than boiling over. You wouldn’t believe how likely it is that someone gets their ass kicked for arguing one side or the other. Like, there was the night that Roger made mild fun of the orange crowd by saying, You can’t even rhyme anything with orange, and Stefan . . . well, Stefan squeezed and twisted two of Roger’s fingers, twisted them until they broke—one and then the other. That actually happened. I still shudder when I think about it. Now, Stefan is more complicated than that episode suggests, and things have been a lot calmer since—but still, that was what you would call a pretty sobering moment. So, anyway, we just keep our opinions to ourselves, even though it’s obviously red out here. Aside from the mountain, which is more complicated.

Anyway, I say to Jenny, through our radio system, So.

We start walking, which is a way bouncier thing than it was on Earth, because of the much lower gravity, and so it’s a little hard to have a serious conversation while walking. It makes you feel like everyone is partly balloon animal. You wouldn’t want to tell someone they had a terminal disease, for example, while walking on Mars. But there aren’t that many places to have conversations—inside and outside are the main two ones—so we do have some important conversations out here, and also some boring ones, and also there’s a lot of not-talking, too.

Mars is a planet where the question What’s new? doesn’t come in very handy. It’s great.

So we start bounce-walking under the old basically familiar sun. Jenny is taking us in the general direction of the Prakt, a big piece of not-working space equipment sent here by a consortium of Scandinavian corporations. It’s about one o’clock, in Mars hours, which are technically only a little longer than Earth hours.

About halfway between Home Sweet and the Prakt, Jenny says, Let’s go to our channel. I hear the click that says that she’s changed to channel nine hundred and forty-seven, which is where we go when we don’t want to be overheard. I change my own radio to channel nine hundred and forty-seven. It’s romantic.

After a few moments, she says, Hey, Josh.

I think about the fact that we all call each other by our first names. I guess I originally expected that we’d wind up with cool nicknames, like Ace and Ratchet and Doc, or at least that we’d do last names, like baseball players. But no.

Hey, Jenny, I say.

I can hear, through the radio, a long, long sigh. There’s something about what we breathe here that makes sighs longer on Mars. Or at least it seems that way. Then Jenny says, And hey, plus-one.

I take one more bounce-step and then bounce-stop. Wait, I say. I can’t see her face and she can’t see mine, because the suits have these gold mirrory sunglass-fronts on them where our faces are. So you lose all the paralanguage for sure. What?

She sighs again, like the sound of the tide going all the way out, if there were an ocean. I’m pregnant, she says.

I’m not sure how long we stand there thinking about that. I know I should be saying something, but mostly my mind is suddenly kind of shorting out and the things I can think of are not worth putting into words. I don’t ask her if the baby’s mine, for example, because the baby is mine. I don’t express disbelief in the fundamental premise of pregnancy based on the fact that we both had operations before coming here, because I’m realizing right now that those operations sometimes don’t work, which is something I should have considered before this. Because, statistically, Jenny and I have had a large amount of sex by now. I don’t even ask what we’re going to do, because I’m sure that we have no idea what we’re going to do. The whole point was that pregnancy on Mars is supposed to be a bad idea a hundred different ways. That’s why the people in charge told all of us not to have sex here, even after the operations.

I say, Wow. I’m feeling a lot of things, but Wow is all I manage.

Yes. Just from her voice, I can’t tell what Jenny is feeling.

I guess this is why they told us not to have sex here, I add.

Yes, she says. It is.

I guess they’re going to be mad at us. There’s supposed to be a call home tonight. They’re going to say that we promised not to.

That’s right, she says.

A few minutes go by. We stare at each other’s sunglass-faces. I feel like my blood is buzzing, like it has a small electrical current in it.

She adds, And yet there’s a whole drawer in the med closet that’s full of pregnancy tests.

Huh, I say.

The Prakt glints off in the distance. From under its coating of red dust.

When we get back to Home Sweet, there’s a party, because there’s no such thing as a private radio channel on a planet this bored. You can just scan all the channels until you find the conversation. So there’s a party. We don’t have any disco ball on Mars, or streamers, but everybody has written CONGRATULATIONS or MAZEL TOV or ¡FELICIDADES! on their tablets and they’re holding their tablets up to show us. The mazel tovs are for me and the felicidades are for Jenny, even though she doesn’t speak as much Spanish as you might expect from a person who has a Puerto Rican mother, not to mention an African American father who’s partly Dominican. Anyway, the congratulations are for both of us. Also, someone has broken out the freeze-dried cake.

You guys, Jenny says.

That night we get the communication request that we’ve been expecting. Earth wants to talk to us. We all hate talking to Earth, because it takes a radio signal about eleven minutes to travel from one planet to the other, and then eleven more for a response to get back, which means that a call is like,

Them: Hello!

[eleven minutes plus eleven minutes]

Us: Hello! How are you?

[eleven minutes plus eleven minutes]

Them: Fine.

Even for us that’s too slow.

Plus, we don’t even really get to talk to Earth. We get to talk to some communications person at the Destination Mars! corporation. Not even the Destination Mars! founder, the person who thought this whole thing up originally and is supposed to be, well, a pretty eccentric person; we talk to communications people. A couple of times we’ve gotten a hearty virtual handshake from one world leader or another, and there was the one time that they put us on with the Cincinnati Bengals cheerleaders for some reason, but mostly it’s corporate. We’re not talking to a representative sample of the Earth population, is what I’m saying.

Still, it’s necessary. We have to arrange for supplies to get sent and we have to tell them about our discoveries, even though we haven’t had any discoveries for a long time. Most of us haven’t even been trying. We were sent here for science, one-way tickets to Mars for a lifetime of Mars research, but it turns out that after a while even scientists can get bored of science. Especially here. Mars, I can tell you, is pretty much rocks, rocks, rocks.

The idea was originally that we would go on to terraform the planet, but we would need more people for that. And at first, Destination Mars! did talk about eventually sending more people, but they’ve been quiet about that for a while.

And now we’re possibly making a new person of our own.

Do you think we should tell them? I say. Two years ago, when we first got here, the Destination Mars! people would already know, because they were filming everything for reality TV back then, but that show got canceled about a year in. Also because of boredom. Now we’d have to actually tell them.

Jenny considers the question. We’re sitting in the common room, because that’s where we sit. On low, reddish vinyl-ish couches and chaises longues next to basically Ikea coffee tables. Orange tables. And here I can see her face now, of course. It’s a round face, with extra-round cheeks. Plus those big light brown eyes. It’s a nice face. Well, they’ll be angry, she says after a while.

I nod. But they can’t actually do anything about it, I say. Can they?

Long exhalation. I guess not. Then, after a minute, Well, they could leave something out of the next supply rocket. The freeze-dried cookie dough ice cream, maybe. Outside the common room window I can see the sun going down. Sunsets are the one not-so-red thing about Mars. There’s more gray in them here.

They would totally kibosh the cookie dough ice cream, I say. I wonder if they’d even go farther than that. Every once in a while, I get the idea that the managers of the Destination Mars! corporation are getting a little fed up with us in general. And that maybe they have some anger issues.

I can hear Roger in the workroom saying hello to someone back on Earth. Hello and then waiting. Still, though, I say. Like, how pregnant are you?

She raises an eyebrow at me. She calls that her Say what? eyebrow.

I mean, how long? I say.

Oh, she says. She picks up her tea from the coffee table. I think almost two months.

Oh, I say. Jenny is really, truly pregnant. The psychosomatic buzzing in my blood has become an itching.

After quite a few minutes I hear someone on Earth say hello back to Roger. Hello and a question about what’s new.

Are we really doing this? she says.

I open my mouth to answer, but Jenny, faster than typical Mars-time, speaks first.

We’d better tell them what’s going on, she says.

We get up and go into the workroom, where Roger is alone in front of the screen. He’s here by default; nobody else has enough patience to have these drawn-out Earth conversations. Sometimes others among us go pop our heads in or say something off-camera, but we don’t tend to stick around. Roger, though—he’s a botanist and a geologist, so he’s used to waiting for things. Also he has trouble saying no. Jenny believes that’s because he’s Canadian; to me that feels a little speculative. Either way, the end result is he ends up doing the calls. Right now he’s starting into a longish update on our rock analysis work, saying it all in one stream for convenience, while the Earth person—a woman called Barbara with rectangular glasses—sits passively, having not yet heard any of what he’s saying. In twenty-two minutes her face will show a reaction to the beginning of his update, though by then he’ll already be done. It’s surreal stuff.

The deeper samples are still under analysis, Roger is saying. He’s really the only one who’s still fully invested in research, actively in touch with other geologists and botanists back on Earth. Though so far they seem pretty similar to the not-as-deep samples. We’re also filling out more of the topographical map at a good pace, he adds, and—

But then we lean in. Also, Jenny says, I’m pregnant.

At which point Roger sort of blushes and lapses into indecision about whether to continue with the map-talk, scratching at his pale, thinning hair with his left hand, which is his hand where the fingers got broken and are still at a slightly uneasy angle from the rest of his hand. I see them and wince. I definitely expected an astronaut with the name Roger to be more dashing and confident than our Roger has turned out to be. I guess that’s because of Buck Rogers, which I have never actually seen, but which I have heard about.

It’s true, I add into the screen.

Barbara, of course, shows no reaction. She can’t, not for another twenty-two minutes. So, we stand there and we wait. We wait and I try to not think about anything at all.

Well, after about twenty minutes we see her nodding dutifully—she’s taking note of Roger’s report—and then abruptly her face registers shock. Wait—what? she says. And then, not about to wait twenty-two minutes for our confirmation, which I already gave anyway, she sputters on. This is why we told you not to have sex, she says.

Jenny rolls her eyes at me, which will probably irritate Barbara in about eleven minutes. In the meantime, we wait for her to continue. But she doesn’t. She waits for us to continue. Oh, boy.

Um, I finally say, "but we already did have sex."

Twenty-two minutes later we get Barbara glaring at the eye roll and then leaning forward toward the camera. You are not allowed to do this, she says.

Jenny and I glance at each other. Because what does that even mean?

This time there’s only a brief pause before Barbara keeps going. You sat through the abstinence films. I know you did because I have your signatures. She shakes a sheaf of papers that are almost definitely not the specific ones we signed about the abstinence films, but for the