Kevin was seven years old when he learned that there would never be a man on Mars.
He was playing outside, spinning around and falling down as he stared up at the big, big sky (it made sense to him, at least), when the degraded carcass of his grandfather’s paper from the day before caught his eye; its frail, papyrus-like husk dangling from the recycling bin by chance alone.
No mars. The moon had been a reckless thing, a fitful spurt of youthful enthusiasm. Humans had outgrown the need to want such childishness. Mars – twice as desolate and infinitely farther – was out of the question. There was no point, no purpose. And that was that.
Kevin was thoughtful, for a seven-year-old. So instead of crying or cursing or bewailing the fates, he went and asked the person who should know.
“Grandpa,” he asked, “are we going to Mars?”
Kevin’s grandpa was busy reading his fresh new paper, only an hour from the lawn. There was a headline about home runs and such that he was particularly keen to get at.
“No,” he said. And he turned the paper a little and squinted; damn they made text small these days.
So Kevin knew disappointment for the first time, and it cut deep with a jagged edge. But like all children his age, very little could keep him down for good. If the world would not operate as he wished, by god he would MAKE it so. He would be an astronaut, or a president, or at the very least a senator or something, and he would see a man on Mars before he was a grownup. That would be how it was.
And then he got older. School became a chore, and then boys, and then more school.
And older. School was done but the world was there, and a career, and a wedding.
And older. Children came and went, the world spun on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and
there Kevin sat on his porch, in his slippers that his just-deceased husband had bought him on their fortieth, staring at the little bed of flowers where his fifth cat had been buried, where the impatiens his youngest daughter had planted ten years ago were coming back in, with a bathrobe on, looking out on a blue-sky morning and thinking about another lawn, a long, long, long time ago when there had been people older than him.
His chair was tilted back a little, and as he slouched he found himself looking up at the sky, by chance alone.
By that evening Kevin had disassembled several of his noisier appliances and hammered together an awful lot of scrap wood from his garage and driven away six inquisitive passersbys with equal parts glass-like staring and cursing. In form it was inelegant and intrusive beyond its size; in function it was undreamt of. Kevin had been dreaming of it since he was six, though it had slipped his mind for some eight decades.
On the bow, he carefully wrote MARS, with a red paintbrush. It had to be red. For Mars.
The sun was setting, the hour was ideal. So Kevin clambered into the cramped little cockpit that every spacecraft demanded, pushed what buttons he’d assembled in the dishwasher-cum-CPU, and blasted off.
He left quite a big hole in the SkyBubble, but he had insurance for that and the little cleaning robots were well on hand to stem the flow of pollutants, so he also left no regrets as the earth’s surface greasily slid away behind him like an old pizza crust. No regrets. Just a home.
What lay ahead worried him much more. He’d just cleared the stratosphere when the satellite police force began to click and whirr at him, demanding that he cease his unauthorized launch, that he provide identification, that he fulfil form CA8-(B)-section 187-T9 before undergoing so on and so forth. Failure to comply would result in bureaucracy.
Kevin listened carefully, and found great pleasure in hearing all the complaints and fussing drift away by inches in his wake as he left the twitterings of low earth orbit behind. Earth was earth and Mars was Mars, and he didn’t see what business of Earth’s it was if he wasn’t on it. It was all bullshit anyways; just see if he felt like coming back after all that nonsense. Up here he had a view, and the stars at high noon, and as many little crumbly biscuits as he could stand eating, which was a lot of them.
First, however, he had to get past that damned space station.
About forty years back, the International Space Station had lost most of its prestige, or at least whatever it had left clinging to it. It had been decommissioned and was scheduled to crash somewhere unattractive and inexpensive when a surprise last-minute buyout from an entertainment conglomerate’s reality TV wing preserved it as a setting for seasons 185-194 of The Bachelorest, to which it was now considered a national monument. There wasn’t a household from Honolulu to Cape Town that didn’t recognize the stylized wedding rings that had been grafted around its airlocks, and the theme tune had been calculated to remain in humming-distance of the public memory for another sixteen meme-cycles.
One of the rings remained stuck around the tip of Kevin’s ship even as he began to pass the moon’s orbit. It irritated him, but not as much as that godawful tune he had stuck in his head.
The moon itself was a strange thing to see at that angle. All the men who’d shared that view that Kevin saw were dead now, and for a long time at that. Nobody else alive had seen that strange, pale landscape with their own eyes.
Just for a lark, he set down on it and had a poke about. Besides, his spacesuit needed testing.
And so the moon, for the first time in a very long while, was home again to shuffling hops and ambitious leaps and bounds and maybe even a quiet caper or two, as a bulging, shrouded mummy of a man wrapped in what looked to be and was a garden hose explored its surface, protected from the fierce cold by a firm layer of blanketing.
The little American flags had been rendered a politely neutral off-white by solar winds and moon dust. He drew a smiley face on one of them, and took some pleasure in knowing that it would be gone in just a few short decades.
On the whole, a good trip, and a good test run, reflected Kevin as he took off, but the gloves needed work. His fingers were white with cold, and he dearly regretted not bringing yarn with him – even at the best speed his former refrigerator could muster, there were a good many days between himself and Mars.
That morning, Kevin officially became the greatest explorer humanity had ever produced in terms of total distance travelled. It occurred during a nap, and he was sorry he missed it. This would not happen again, and to outline his determination he acquired pencil and paper and wrote down a list:
Records I Have Created
-Greatest distance travelled in a single trip by a human
in the neatest print he could manage, which wasn’t very. Then to celebrate he held a small party for breakfast consisting of as many handfuls of dry breakfast cereal as he could catch with his tongue in zero gravity, and this was why he was distracted when the first shot landed against his starboard bow.
Forty-seven hours later, Kevin updated his list in a much shakier hand.
Records I Have Created
-Greatest distance travelled in a single trip by a human
-First survivor of deliberate attack upon a spaceship
-First human contact with extraterrestrial lifeforms
-First human participant in interstellar warfare
-First human murderer of alien lifeforms, with breakfast spoon (self-defense)
-First human murderer of alien lifeforms, with box of cereal (self-defense)
-First human to appropriate and comprehend alien technology
-First human mass-murderer of alien lifeforms, with fusion-powered plasma cannon (self-aggression)
-First in-flight repair of starship using scavenged on-site materials
-?Longest single sentence consisting entirely of the word ‘fuck’? (46 hrs, 42 mns, 8 scs???)
He considered the last entry, then added another three question marks.
The stars were more crowded than Kevin had imagined. He wasn’t sure if he minded or not.
Oh, it took some of the grandeur, some of the SPECTACLE out of his lonesome voyage… but it also made it not so lonesome. Although after his third encounter with the Purple Teeth, he found himself wishing for loneliness, having exhausted all diplomatic options: first peace offerings, then aggressive posturing, and finally ramming them directly amidships. Admittedly the last had worked very well, but he couldn’t help but feel that it was cheating, and the unpleasant way the Purple Teeth twitched as they drifted through space gave him the crawling willies.
The Blue Ones were nicer, though too focused on business for his tastes. Yes, they were polite, yes, they had given him a very nice deal on that patch repair job after the ramming went a bit overenthusiastically,
-First human to negotiate invoice beyond Earth
but they were as firm as anything on the letter of a contract, were too eager to say goodbye once the contract was over, and he didn’t like the way they smiled. It was too plastic. Apparently artificial lips were all the rage on Planet Blue Ones or something, but he still didn’t like it.
No, his favourites were still the Sort of Biege-y People, even if they’d arrived just as he’d started to run out of names. They were quiet (even if they had no mouths), neighbourly (even if they’d eaten his breakfast spoon by mistake, assuming it was a snack), and discreet (even though they’d explained to him that this was because his ship’s atmosphere would instantly dissolve their innards and they would rather stay inside their suits, thank you very much).
Also, they’d shown him how to mount a giant near-hallucinatory electric signboard to the side of his ship that blared unknown symbols into the inky universe in a language that had been invented eleven million years ago. He had been told that it meant “Purple Teeth Teeth-Crusher Expert Supreme” or something close enough to it. A dubious message, but it’d seemed to work.
Yes, space was noisy. But Mars – Mars would be quiet. And nice. He’d been told that.
“Will it be very busy?” he’d asked.
The Sort of Biege-y People Captain had taken some time to think before writing down his answer in the strange gelatin they used as ink.
“No.”
“Why not?”
The Captain sucked all his limbs inside his torso and extended them again three times in one second, which was explained apologetically as a ‘shrug’-equivilant over the cleanup.
“Why would it be? There is nothing there.”
Well, there would be something down there soon, Kevin had said. He looked out his little window, the window that had once adorned his washing machine, and saw the red dot grow. There would be something down there soon.
There was a small Abyss-Eater colony on Phobos, home to a flock some sixteen members strong, each a league or more in length and half again that in width. Luckily, Kevin had packed his garden clothesline, and with liberal usage of this tool and plenty of scrap metal he had soon harnessed a landing craft the likes of which (he imagined) Neil Armstrong would’ve given his left foot for, even if it remained a little bit surly and a great deal ugly. He’d owned worse pets, and loved them too. Besides, this one ate microasteroids. Useful!
The trip down to Mars was conducted in reverent silence, save for the occasional resentful whine of the Abyss-Eater, which Kevin soothed with gentle pats from a sharpened coathanger against its titanium hide. Reddish light from a yellow star glinted off the dunes and rocks beneath him, filling up his helmet’s view inch by inch until it was the world and the stars were faraway again. He felt heavy again, very heavy, and realized with some surprise that he was an old man. How had that happened?
Well, there was one thing to do, and it didn’t matter how old he was. Mars was there, mere inches from a boot. One step, two step, hop, thump.
He’d thought he’d make some sort of speech, but he’d never found the time to write it. And as he looked around him – from cold dirt to colder stone – Kevin couldn’t think of what he could ever say.
A man was on Mars. A man stood on Mars.
That was that then. Wasn’t it?
And as he stood there, alone in the dust, Kevin looked up and up and away from the stones and dirt around him, and watched the sky.
It was a big sky.
Well, they’d always said they’d never put a man on Alpha Centauri, either.