Landing was easy. Jumping around in suits, gathering dust,
fixing robots? Easy. Colonising the place? Impossible. The sullen red ball didn’t
want any long-term residencies. Those who went there said it was the suits, that
they were unable to withstand the perpetual sandstorms, the absolute dryness.
It wasn’t the suits, but the people in them.
There were no smells but the smell of their own rancid
breath inside helmets. No sounds other than their own rancid, shallow breathing
and the slow churr of passing robots.
There was the standard initial excitement: touchdown, the flag, selfies with
the dusty, motionless antiques, dead in their experiments. All but Curiosity,
found at the foot of Olympus, its wan cameras staring at the peak.
So the M.O.O.N., Martian Occupation by Orbital Nearness – or
the Web –, was built; a spindled hexagon a mile at the radius. Each spoke
joined by three thin corridors around a rotating spherical hub, the Spider. Its
occupants were known as Flies. A similar, smaller station occupied Venus, the
Fly-Trap.
The Web, the largest man-made structure ever built
off-planet, dwarfed the lunar science estate and launch-pad. It orbited Mars
like the ISS orbited Earth, decades ago. Nothing orbits Earth now. Nothing but
the Moon. A big clean-up was ordered by new laws, and people took interest in
space again. All the shit just got in the way.
The Web followed Mars’s two onion-moons, criss-crossing over
the Valles Marineris. The storms of Jupiter, visible with the naked eye when
the planets were closest. What the Flies were there for, was the Sparrow.
Hallam Coop was the test pilot. At forty-two, his hair was
greying at the temples but through vigorous spacetime exercises, his
musculature and complexion were as taut as they were twenty years
previous. The sparrow was a small, light
spacecraft that could be worn like a suit. He stepped into the neoprene boots
and trousers, strapped on the triangular, jet-powered wings and Teflon helmet. Coop
shuffled, performed a little shadow-box for the cameras on his way to the launch-bay.
‘Sparrow Test Flight. Single circumference of the M.O.O.N.
Attempt Number One.’
The bay doors parted with a steely groan. No profound words
of pioneering endeavour from Coop. They heard him scream something beginning
with ‘F’ as he was sucked away around the west side of the Red Planet. They
looked at each other, wondering who to blame for this failure. A man was lost
in space.
‘He’s back!’ someone said. And all moved to see their
colleague spiralling around from the east. His voice re-appeared in their
speakers, still screaming. The Sparrow smashed into the Spider. All were
killed, but the web remained, drifting around the sombre planet like a lost
wish in the wind.
