I thought the key prerequisite would be our psychological capacity to drink each other’s filtered urine. Paul and I are high-humidity people. It’s warm in here and we’re both vigorous. In transit, the hygrometer warns us if our sweat and exhalations are going to damage the instrumentation. For Paul’s semen there are only two sustainable options: I swallow it or he ejaculates directly into the waste tube. Only the former is palatably human. Not just the old-earthy pornographic appeal, but the anxiety of losing still-viable parts of ourselves to the void. My body harvests enzymes, sugars, and acids; it does half the filtration work before I urinate and our machine does the rest. The crystal distillate drips into the hydro tank. We slurp from it, make coffee with it. We are in transit for six months, adescrewing constantly.

When we arrive, the final stagger is our landing legs snapping under us: a yardstick drop to the bedrock. We unstrap and drag ourselves to the windows to look at the other machines: white turretless tanks, black eyes under angled shells. The omnistorm skims over everything. The air’s just one rusted twilight, even with the statite refractors frying us from midpoint. The far machine is as gritty as a mollusk: Tava and Will have been here four years. Muriel and Gord’s machine is clearer and closer, with black print reading MUSKOX12A342. They’ve been here for two. A pair of pressure suits hangs off each machine like silver fingerlings sucking scum off a shark’s belly. We radio our greetings over. “Welcome!” says Gord. That’s it.

We’re useless for days. Paul twitches at resistance bands while I lean clammily against each of the portholes, one after the other, looking out in all directions. In good light if I brace myself and dip my knees I can see the skyline rimming the lowest mountains, which are to the west. We can’t look up. We can’t see the sky, just whatever falls from it. So far: diluted sun, heavy dirt.

Paul thumbs my spine, puts his conch mouth against my ear. Even with his face carved out and his shoulders caved from transit, Paul is still so handsome he is a separate species. We deflate, skin puddling, legs parted by each other’s faces. Often, we pull apart to catch our breath and relax the musculature. Midorgasm, I cramp and my foot withers like a crone’s claw.

Three days, then Gord comes over to pick up the supplies we’ve hauled. Everything we will build here is delivered in fragments because every freighted pound costs the Foundation two hundred and seventy thousand. Gord drives from his machine to ours in a little white transport, like an airport baggage cart with its jolting trailer. In his suit, he’s a clown in a clown car. Roofless, flapping little doors, plastic windscreen, miniature steering wheel. It’s marked MUSKRAT23404AA6.

He shoulders out of his suit’s backport, dragging himself up through our floor. I don’t get up from my stool. We’ve pulled shirts on, but our wet skin suctions to all the vinyl. “Come in,” Paul says, hovering. “Good to see you.”

“Welcome,” says Gord, again. He wipes his hands on his T-shirt, and when he shakes, his grip is fishboned. His smiling teeth are eroded. His skull is too large for his dewlapped neck. White sodium vees his solar plexus. He is the only person I’ve seen besides Paul in six months, and I have years of isolation training, but his smell is astonishing. Grease and fluids float off him into our air. He’s spattering a trail like a fryer.

“Have a seat. Have some—” Paul bustles for the nutrition slurry, which is mostly amino acids, oligosaccharides, and triglycerides, plus vitamins and minerals.

“Ha, lord, no,” says Gord. “Mercy.” He sits down with me at the hinged aluminum plank. Two years here and he’s a gnome wearing the pelt of a man. I’ve lost an inch of height already. Bone mass goes at one percent a month. Paul is doing better, but he had more muscle and bone to start with. Transit was worst. Now that we’ve arrived we won’t recover, but we might brake the plunge.

“I’m kidding,” says Gord, fumbling at his shoulder straps. “Nectar of the gods, right? But actually I brought you, uh, these. Anyway I remember what it was like, getting here.”

He presents two plexiglass ring boxes, one strawberry in each. Pink heart fruit with a curlicue sprig.

Paul opens the lid, smells his fruit twice, then eats it, greenery and all. I slide mine across the aluminum to look at it.

“That,” Paul says. “How did—”

“Can’t live on sludge forever,” Gord says, and laughs. I glance at Paul. We ate the slurry exclusively for three years before we even left the ground. It satisfies the body wholly.

“Thank you,” Paul says.

“It’s beautiful,” I say. I nudge my plastic box with my knuckle.

“Don’t mention it. So. I’ll pull what’s marked out of your hold,” Gord says. “I guess the manifest has your gadgets cordoned off and flagged.”

“The launch tower. It’s the most important,” I tell him.

“No doubt,” says Gord. “I’ll set that up for you first thing.”

“I think—” I say.

“May as well get started though, am I right?” Gord stands back up.

Paul opens his mouth, eyes following Gord’s preparatory movements: hand on shoulder strap, shifting weight.

“I’ll see you two around,” says Gord. He shakes Paul’s hand. He lowers himself into his suit, and for hours we can hear him scraping around like a raccoon in the guts of our machine, loading up the muskrat. Then we watch him ferry loads to his own machine, several trips. And then, much later, he delivers a set of six hatboxes to Will and Tava.

I find one of his black hairs on the floor, one in the vestibule, and a handprint like a comma on the brushed grain of the table.


 
This morning we have been running on the vacuum treadmills. It is minus forty-eight degrees Celsius outside, the wind is a steady seventy kilometers per hour. Inside, the temperature is twenty-nine and the relative humidity’s fifty-five. Outside, the humidity is negligible. The pressure is negligible. The carbon cycle is stopped dead. I can’t see Will and Tava’s machine through the dirt, but Gord is out there shoveling preliminary ditches. In sixty years the atmospheric pressure might rise to Alps-like levels, which would be enough to suck a sheet of manufactured gases close to the ground. Another twenty years and breathing could be possible, with a respirator. Six years ago I paid twenty-three thousand dollars to cut out my uterus, as part of the qualification process. In one hundred years the Foundation will send a breeding pair.

Paul, with shining shoulders and sweat runneling his collarbones, comes to stand at the window with me. We only ever wear underwear now. The whole machine’s wet with us. I pinch my hip’s putty skin as I watch Gord stab his shovel. Pause. Lift. Again.

“Spaceman digging ditches.” Paul names it like a painting. He takes my hand and I stop pinching. I lean my breast against his shoulder and tuck a thumb into his wet armpit. It’s not that we smell the same but that our smells offer an identical comfort. There have been times of high stress—pre-landing, the exams, the curtains—where I have taken the sheet we sleep under and cupped it over my face and inhaled, repeatedly, inhaled. The way the nose is like the clitoris, a gentle useless button of pleasure, inseparable yet entirely different from the hard-working functional mouth, or vagina.

After Gord left our machine I ignored my strawberry. Later, Paul glanced at it, and I took it from the box and put it in his mouth. He chewed and swallowed it. I kissed him and swiped the taste of it—molecular alien, time-traveler—from his mouth, clambered up him to crawl after it, him dropping back into what used to be my pilot’s chair, me fingering aside last stretches of fabric to harden his cock up and sink onto it.

Paul says, “I hope Tava has a good view of him digging.”

“I don’t know how they’re going to record us,” I say.

“They can probably imagine it.”

“Then why not just stay home.”

“Us in the cockpit’s not so exciting.”

“What else would she paint? The rock.”

“Omnistorm number seventy-three.”

“Omnistorm number 17,180.”

Since I landed us we’ve repurposed the sensors and torn out the obsoletes. A trash pile of vinyl shock cushions, knotty wiring, and aluminum facing has accumulated under the dumbwaiter airlock. Gord magpies all this off for use elsewhere, without knocking. Gord also assembled my launch tower, as promised, aligning my hundreds of tiny virile rockets into ready patterns. Strapped in our chairs, our machine settles a paralysis over us. The monitor is a yoke. Drifts of follicles and our scratched epidermis sludge the gaps between keys. Our oil blurs the aluminum in favored places.

We count our shifts in quarter cycles. Sleep, work, break, work, repeat. We celebrate the day’s extra forty minutes at noon, usually by screwing. Sometimes Paul reads. Until we die we’ll be catching comets. I am responsible for exo-monitoring, launching outbound rockets to snare the passing icebergs. Paul guides them in, dragging them off-course toward our southern pole. They gush frozen water and ammonia while the blast melts the icecaps. His reports focus on average mean temperature, sulfur hexafluoride buildup. In a hundred years we’ll have denuded the solar system of all eight thousand, and both poles will be wholly melted, leaving the surface twenty-five percent drinkable water. We average three asteroids a day, with a wide variance from seventeen to none for weeks. They come as they will. The Foundation denies the mathematical possibility that I could snare one too large and bury us all a kilometer deep in shrapnel.

We also nurse a bacteria swarm, seventy thousand species of lichen and algae. These are located in one square meter of transparent plexiglass shelving near the waste tube. The molds alone: mustard, butter, mint, forest, turquoise, teal, lavender, violet, carmine, rust, corpse gray, cloud blue. I pull them out, tray by tray, every square centimeter sealed and glowingly alive, except for the black-boxed ones, tucked away from the light.

I don’t have a nail file and my fingers are flaking in sedimentary layers as I use one to clean the other. They get to ugly angles from the way I peel them off. The occasional hangnail. Paul’s toe clippers aren’t helpful.

“Put in a request,” he says.

“Waste twenty grams on a nail file.”

“Maybe Muriel has one.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Muriel’s?” he says.

“Anything,” I say. “I’m not asking.”

Nothing from Will and Tava. I really thought there would be more chatter on the radio. It’s the isolation training: the cure is also the cause.


 
Just after a calm sunrise Gord crosses the triangle, heading west from Will and Tava’s machine, but it isn’t Gord, because there are two suits dangling from Gord and Muriel’s machine and only one at Will and Tava’s. So is it Will? He climbs into the muskrat and drives out of my porthole’s frame. I haul myself to the northernmost hole, but he’s on his way past an outcrop, hunched against occasional gusts, driving into the flats.

Later, Gord is out digging a new ditch, a fourth—just a year now, until the next pair lands and makes us a parallelogram, bringing silky connector tubes to line our sightlines and allow us all to crawl around tapping on each other’s airlocks—and he doesn’t look overly alarmed that the muskrat is gone.

“That was Tava that drove off,” Paul says when I go and stand over the cockpit. “Definitely a woman.”

“You can’t tell.”

“I can tell between Muriel and Gord,” he says.

“Because of her toolbelt.”

“I was looking out the scope. It was Tava.” Paul’s voice, when he’s irritated, indicates I should shut up.

I shut up. I am developing a rough patch of skin on my left tricep. I rub it and the skin whitens and drifts away, leaving small yellowish and red bumps of varied size.

I pry one of the suit-ports open in the vestibule and look down into the well of cold I’ve unstoppered. I paddle my hand in the temperature gradient. I reseal it, tell the suit to test and prepare itself while I go back to the living room and put on all my layers of clothing, which still stink with the anxiety of blast-off. Putting on socks is a small strangulation. The leggings are stranger. They sag. When I return, the suit’s pressure is satisfactory, and the thermocline’s equalized. I dip my swabbed appendages into it. Feet slide into feet, hands into hands.

“Are you leaving?”

I twist, catch him in the corner of my eye. He is framed in the halo of my backport, its bullseye is my nape. Once, he left me to clean myself up after our orgasms, then came back and found me masturbating.

I modulate my voice, “Not far.”

He hulks over me. It’s unpleasant to keep twisting, and I can’t see him, so I settle forward into my dangle. “Would you like to come?” I ask. Through the suit’s visor I can see the soil and rock in infinite close detail, sweeping itself clean. My boots hang thirty centimeters above. I swing my feet in them.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Paul says, and slaps the lever back to seal me out.

All I can smell is myself. The suit checks and confirms my independence. I grip the grab bars and lower to the surface. Beside me, the other suit hangs from the neck like a kitten or a convict.

I turn to look up at the closed port. Of course he cannot come. One of us has to let the other back in.

I step out from under our machine’s belly, into the omnistorm. It’s like midnight in the North Atlantic. I may as well be clinging to an orange foam vest. The wind churns like I’m pulling from the propeller’s maelstrom. At any second the blade that powers this place might cleave me, or a whipping thousand-ton anchor chain might snap and seize me. The half-formed atmosphere is shrieking about the carnage happening in the other hemisphere: twenty billion megaton collisions digging cradles two kilometers deep for the unborn oceans. If I ended my bombardment today this storm wouldn’t settle for a decade.

Gord has gone inside. All the suits are hanging in place. I examine Gord’s ditches. Two meters down into the regolith, one across. One hundred meters between each machine, including the smoothed-out foundation for the approaching pair. The trenches are sealed with long tongues of rock-bolted tarpaulin that flap loose in the places where the wind is shoveling dirt back in.

I walk into our field of light turbines. The cone-faced flowers are child-height. Today the storm is so dark they don’t know where to look and turn to shake their heads at each other. I touch the crowns of their gritty craniums. Then for a second the wind dies and the light’s filter unhinges to let the sun slosh down clear, and all of us look up.


 
“Testing, testing,” says the radio during third shift.

Paul and I look at each other. He moves first.

“I’m not sure exactly what—” He pokes his face at the mic. “Hello?”

“Hello. Paul?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Tava. How are you? Listen, we saw your wife out on her promenade and Will realized he hasn’t even interviewed the both of you yet!”

Paul stares at me. After a bit, his mouth moves: “Oh. Oh, no. I guess. . . he hasn’t.”

“We thought you might drop by for dinner if you’re free this week.”

“Oh,” Paul says, “Dinner?”

“We’d love to have you.”

He doesn’t take his eyes off me. One of my hands keeps flipping onto its back in the air.

“Yeah sure,” Paul says. “That sounds great.”

“Does any day work for you in particular?”

“Well, any time, really.”

I tap the monitor in front of me with the backs of my fingernails.

“Oh,” he says. “Except we’re babysitting the comets. So, actually now that I think about it. One of us has to be here.”

“Oh, I see.”

There is some murmuring. Paul scowls at me.

Tava again: “That’s really too bad. Those routines aren’t something you could transfer over here to our machine I guess.”

“Well, maybe,” Paul says, because he is amenable.

I am shaking my head. We are ultra-specialized, compared to the other machines, which are built only to keep bodies alive and have half our brainpower. I don’t say this out loud to the radio. I could be in another segment of the machine, oblivious to this conflict. Excess sweat is running from my armpits into the flooded band I wear as a shirt.

“Actually,” Paul says. “My wife’s saying no, we can’t. Our setup here is . . . complicated.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” says Tava. “What bad news.”

I tuck my chin down and jab random functions on my monitor.

“But listen,” Paul says. “You’re welcome to come over here instead. We’d love to have you.”

“No, no, we couldn’t just invite ourselves over.”

“No, no,” says Paul. “We’d really love it. Like you say, we haven’t even met yet.”

I look back up, mouth open. If he’d look at me I’d flip my hand again.

“Well, in that case we’ll bring dinner.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Paul again. “We’re cooking.”

“A salad, at least,” says the radio.

Paul laughs as he shakes his head and hangs up. He comes to sit back down, smiling.

“They have vegetables?” I ask.

“Weren’t they joking?” he says.

I don’t answer. I don’t know. We’ve been here fourteen months.


 
His hair is getting shaggy. “We should do haircuts,” I tell him. I never look at mine because the first time he cut it I was angry. We’re better without mirrors. We look to each other. From the feel of it the patch at the top of my spine is growing out faster than the rest, as always. When I look at my reflection in the porthole my eyes are so deep in my skull I can’t see them, just the lights of the other machines: one tri-eyed, one cyclopsed.

Paul digs out the clippers. They are supposed to suck away the detritus through the waste tube, but there’s dandruff and slick shafts like black paper cuts on his shoulders and closed eyes. Everything sticks or floats. I pet his curls forwards into a charming cowlick, grade the sides precisely. When he shears me everything is bald even. He has never discerned the difference between ‘buzz’ and ‘pixie.’ I have always had two concerns about this: visibility of pimples, like the current triad on my neck, and how, as a child, I had large ears.

After he’s shaved me we screw. As soon as I come, he pulls away and pulses his cock into the waste tube, fisting into its mouth. Our machine’s apparatus is a pearly transparent worm drifting around his legs as it sucks. His spine curls fetally. When he disengages he finds me a cloth to wipe myself.


 
Tava and Will put a steaming chicken pot pie in the airlock. I pull it out of its silver case as Paul helps them dock. Tava pulls herself up into our machine with overlong arms. She is shrunk-faced with blonde hair. She wears bangs and eyeliner and a black dress that is tight enough to show the narrow rolls at her waist and also how her breasts are mildly lopsided in that they are unrestrained and glance in googly directions. She has an authoritative mouth but with her snub nose and jowls she looks just a little bit doggish. She is forty-three and her paintings are mostly of cities. On Earth I read an article that said her treatment of city as landscape, her lack of distinction between human and natural, is why she was chosen. The article called her derivative and sentimental. Another article I read said she once painted covers for science fiction novels, green many-limbed animals, implying also that she was a poor choice, if not the worst choice. One of her paintings, which looked to me like a cliff and sunbathers, sold for eighty million dollars after she and Will were named to document the settlement. Tava was the first human on Mars. Will was a close second.

Will is egg-headed and his arms are also too long, and tattooed. Paul read his book on the way here. He is fifteen years older than her. Their age gap was a concern: it increases the likelihood one of them will die and one of them will be left alone to go crazy in their machine while the rest of us are helpless to stopper the grief. But the Foundation’s physicians did their Death Index assessments and implemented a micro-regimen of tetrodotoxins to even things out.

“Where did you get this?” I say, cradling the blue-flowered Corning Ware.

“It’s a family recipe,” says Tava. “I hope you like it. Oh god, you both eat chicken, don’t you? I didn’t even think to ask.”

My body has not digested solids in quantities greater than seventy grams—three squares of chocolate on my last birthday on Earth—in fifty-eight months.

Will presents a liter of water in a clear glass bottle with a rubberized seal. “Our own private distillation,” he says, and Tava laughs and pincers his waistline with both hands.

“God I miss wine,” she says. “They didn’t send you up with any, I bet.”

“Unfortunately,” says Paul.

“Us either,” Will says. “But we swap waters with the Bateses over there, just to get something new on the palate.”

“Do you mind if I use your washroom?” She waggles her fingers. Her nails are glossed and even.

“Please,” I say, and lead her to the nook where the waste tube coils. I pull the plastic divider around for her privacy. I gaze into my dormant lichens. The prismatic light farm looks festive. A Christmas cube. I miss my fat, anxious mother.

“Those two,” Tava says through the plastic. “Not to gossip, but I have never seen a mother and son get along so well.”

“We’ve never met Muriel,” I say. I take two steps away.

“Us either!” says Tava, and I pause. There is a small sound which I try not to hear. A motor whirrs. Then the suction hose slurps. Tava sighs.

“I see her out maintaining the light turbines,” I say.

“Her and that magenta toolbelt. It’s the only thing that color on the whole planet. Has it ever occurred to you that it’s just Gord out there? Wearing the toolbelt?”

“No,” I say.

“She had him when she was fourteen. That’s why they’re so close,” Tava says. She brushes the privacy curtain aside. “Will reads all the files, it’s his process. He’s honestly so excited to interview you two.”

My file says Bachelor of Applied Arts in Business Admin. I spent sixteen years in Titusville, twelve in Tampa, seven in training. My target death range is fifty-two to fifty-three; ninety-six percent probability of organ failure (environmental conditions).

Will has produced long-stemmed glasses out of the insulated case. They ting when jostled.

He pours four from his own bottle. The liquid is carbonated. How do they carbonate it? “It’s great to finally meet you two. How goes the bombardment?”

“Ongoing,” I say.

We don’t have plates. Will produces plates out of the insulated case. We don’t have cutlery. Will produces cutlery.

“You said you’d bring a salad,” I say.

“Did we? Oh no,” Will looks to Tava.

“You’re disappointed,” she says.

“No, I’m not. I didn’t mean.” They stare at me. I’m miserable. “I was curious.”

Paul stares at the empty plate in his hands.

“Tava was craving something warm and filling, so we thought.”

“We . . .” I say. “Don’t we . . . ?” I try again.

“It’s November,” says Tava.

Paul jumps in: “It smells delicious. We haven’t had anything like this in ages.”

“Why, thank you, Paul!” Tava smiles at him.

“We were just saying on the way over we think it’s a pity that we never see the comets,” says Will, spooning steaming heaps of flake pastry and meat. Gravy.

“Oh I know,” says Tava. “The collisions must be spectacular. How can we see them?”

I look at Paul.

“That’s not really—” he says.

“You can’t go over there,” I say.

“Obviously driving would take months.” Will agrees, “We’d die.”

“But you could aim one closer couldn’t you,” says Tava. “So we could see it.”

“God, no,” says Paul.

“You think we’d die?” says Will.

“I haven’t even seen one in the sky, is the problem,” says Tava. “Easily the most visually crucial act we’ll commit in this place.”

“And the most important to settlement,” says Will.

“It’s basically the same as an H-bomb. Clouds,” Paul says.

“And then,” Tava adds, “the crater.”

I am worried about the added carbonation from the fizzing water we are all holding—taken from their system and released into ours—even though it is negligible, milliliters. The cycle is closed. They are also adding a liter of water to us. We must make them drink a liter of ours. Their water tastes briskly green. It’s neutral, acidless. A bit of sodium, some sweet linger at the end. The carbonation is especially alien. I anticipate heartburn. Why are they carbonating their water. Where did they grow chicken.

“The other thing we want to do,” says Tava.

“Our other big plan—I know, we have so many—have you seen the map regarding the other settlement?”

“Of course they’ve seen it.”

“Right, so if we could bring back one of those machines. Or a few. I mean, it could be ongoing.”

“They’re, what would you say, two hundred clicks out?”

“Basically just sitting there.”

“The space would be so useful, we’re thinking. Like, a little community center. We could put in a garden. I guess you guys don’t have . . .” Tava peers around, as if to check that we do not, indeed, have a garden.

“What other settlement?” I say.

“The bandwidth crew,” Tava says. She looks from Paul to me. “For the data stream infrastructure. First priority.”

“I thought you were the first,” I say to her.

Everyone laughs, even Paul. I look at him.

“We’ve been out there. It’s not so far. Seven hours return.”

“But what about the people?” I say.

“The people?” Tava glances at Will, who shrugs.

“Almost all recycled by now,” he says.

When they leave, I find blonde hair clumped in the clippers’ fanged mouth. She shaved a part of herself using our clippers. The strands are short, near translucent. She is out there, wearing one painless, hairless stripe.


 
At noon the next day, Paul dresses. His leggings float around his calves. He puts Tava’s clean casserole dish into the dumbwaiter airlock, glass lid upside down. He lowers into his suit. I stand over him. His face has weathered down to ridges. I want to tell him how horrible it is out there. I want to trim his urge from him like a fingernail. But he is closed to complaint. “Shut up,” he says. His body, which I love, is already strung outside in the storm. I slap the lever back and our machine locks against him. What closeness is there. Is there such a thing as being adequately close.