In which there is a second installment. (Back to chapter 1.)

7.

It took my stupid-tired self about fifty minutes to shut down the dome. I didn’t want the bodies exposed to air and heat; they’d just rot. Somebody would want this site preserved for forensics or something.

Maybe.

Plus it was a waste of resources, running an entire dome for a bunch of dead people. Life-long near-poverty had made me nothing if not frugal.

I’d walked around, still inside my suit, and looked at them – the people on my team, the people I’d applied with, trained with, and traveled through space with – for a morbidly long time. Some just looked like they were asleep, but many of them had done the sorts of things you’d expect during a real death. They were in weird positions, eyes open or half open, and I was glad I couldn’t smell the air in the dome. Once I realized that they were all actually, literally, and unequivocally deceased, it became important that I shut off the dome. I knew they were all filled with bacteria that wanted to turn them into puddles, but they were humans – from earth – and precious to me. I wanted them intact.

When the power whined down I realized I should have vented the air first. Now I’d have to operate the airlock manually. I sighed, and waddled over to the lock.

8.

There were too many bodies in there for me to feel like I needed to do anything else. It wasn’t like I was trained for death rites or something. I knew that in Japan a family could pay someone to come to their home and ritually prepare a body for burial, but I certainly didn’t know how to wash and lay out a fucking body. And it’s not like I could dig that many graves all by myself. I felt guilty and lonely and really pissed off about it.

The silence was endless.

I had spent several hours turning part of the ship and some big awkward-looking chunks I’d found on a pallet into a sort of insecty forklift. The instructions were in color pictographs with fewer than twenty words; anyone with an IQ over seventy would have been able to do it, yet still I felt inordinately proud of myself for having built a forklift all by myself.

I was starving, my belly audibly gurgling inside my suit, driving a pallet with a shelter kit on it to a flat spot some seventy meters from the big dome. I was going to erect the shelter, get it heated and filled with air, and then cycle inside and eat about four rations in one go.

And then I was going to get three more shelters and some generators and build myself a house.

9.

I stayed in the little shelter near the dome for a few days, so I had somewhere to eat and sleep and get clean. It was impersonal and beige and functional in exactly the same way as a cheap motel. I ate rations that were food-like without quite being like food. The rest of my time I’d spent scouting a location, and then driving supplies there with the little forklift.

I wanted to be in a fairly sheltered area, close to the dome but not in sight of it. I found my homestead a few klicks away to the south in a shallow valley. I hoped the protection of a valley would lessen the effects of the next giant dust storm, but I really had no way of knowing. The work was strange because things didn’t weigh as much as they should, but after a few sixteen-hour work days I had a dwelling, powered and assembled, stocked with food and water and supplies, and a rock-free roadway from it back to the dome.

I had a little radio that duplicated my suit’s communications functions, and I left it on all the time. I had one shelter rigged as a living area – kitchen, bath, bedroom – and another as a garden. The third was attached but not furnished or heated; I parked the forklift in it and decided it was a garage.

I’d never had my own garage. It was pretty cool.

I’d gone back to the ship and retrieved my one small parcel of personal belongings, so my shelter now boasted sixty terabytes of music, books, vids, and reference, and a couple of bright cloth sarongs I’d used as wall decorations. I had some jewlery and personal clothing. I had plenty of rations, and my seeds were germinating in neat little clear acrylic trays under their lamps.

I was worried about water, though.

We’d landed near what was hoped to be an aquifer. The military dudes were roughnecks; they were supposed to drill for water and purify it for the whole community. I knew only what was supposed to happen, and nothing about how to do it. The mission planners hadn’t expected the entire expedition save one to drop dead two days after landing. I’d looked around but hadn’t found any information on building an ice well, not even any shiny full-color pictograms. I’d brought back an extra pallet of water and put it in my garage. It, like the two extra shelters, was more than I was entitled to, but no one else was going to need it.

Later I did the math and realized that I had more than a lifetime’s worth of water, now that everyone else was dead.

10.

Every few days I went back over to the dome and pilfered more items for my homestead. My kitchen had a cooler and a cooker. My workstation had a screen originally intended for the community center and really great speakers and tons of storage. My sleeping shelf had three futons and extra bedding.

My seeds were sprouting; tiny furry beasts unfurling in their damp little beds. I started a separate tray with Martian dust, earth water, and three of each kind of seed I had, as an experiment.

My radio squawked telemetry for about ten hours while another ship landed. I suited up and went outside for awhile, but I never saw it. I resolved to find and assemble my community’s transmitter so I could talk to other humans. As I was walking around my yard, I scraped the dust with my foot and found ice. I loosened a few chunks and put them in a container to take inside to melt, but then realized I had no way of testing it to see if it was drinkable. Another item I had to find and learn how to use.

I had a large but ultimately finite amount of water and food. I could grow some veggies, but had no way to grow rice or legumes. Everything I needed to live here, to really survive here, presupposed some level of technology I didn’t have or didn’t understand.

Mars fucking sucked, but at least I didn’t have to worry about the economy.

I cycled back inside, checked on my greenhouse, put on my jammies, and had a seven-hour movie marathon. In the dark with the big screen and the audio up loud, I forgot I was alone on a foreign planet for awhile. I opened several rations and ate the desserts out of them, stacking the rest of the food in my tiny kitchen for later. A scene in one of the movies made me pause and dig through my wiki to see if I possessed anything I could make booze out of: I was pretty sure there was sugar, but was there any distiller’s yeast? I added the items to my scrounge list and returned to my movie night, mindlessly eating applesauce with a biodegradable spork that would never degrade biologically on Mars.

11.

I put myself on a regular forty-hour work week.

During work hours, I drove pallets from the dome over to a flat spot about a quarter mile from my homestead, and set up rows of by-the-regs shelters, stocking them exactly as they were supposed to be stocked. Each had one generator, one futon, one quarter pallet of water, one eighth pallet of rations, grow trays, lights, seeds, toiletry items, radios, heaters, and suit repair kits.

I didn’t set all nine hundred of the shelters up, just twelve. No reason, really. It was what I’d been trained for. It was something to do.

I often ate lunch in the single shelter next to the dome rather than going home. It was my restaurant. I kept the interesting, rare rations there: ethnic varieties, vegetarian options, kosher and halal meals.

Evenings and weekends I hung out at home in my thin cotton pajamas, misting my seedlings, reading up on hydroponic food production, watching movies, and trying to recombine the more common rations into interesting meals.

I’d spent my entire life hating the forty-hour work week, considering it arbitrary and soul-suckingly awful. There was no need for people to work that much; it was a cultural habit, and one that I loathed. Two days off was not enough time to get one’s house in order and socialize and pursue personal interests. But here I was, working five days a week, just because if I didn’t I would sleep all the time. The routine gave me a sense of purpose, even though with my entire colony dead and no one else slated to land within driving distance I really didn’t have much purpose. Beyond turning rations into waste until I died of accident or old age, at any rate.

I’d finally realized I could have lived in the ship itself, but I didn’t know how to close it up. Most of it had powered down, and my explorations of the bridge and other technical sections didn’t make it clear to me how I could boot it back up. The whole ship had been opened to Martian atmosphere after we’d landed, to facilitate unloading and disassembly. It reminded me of a sailing ship sunk in the sea: intact, but useless.

The landing manual indicated that even the flight control modules had been designed for some other purpose – communications, mainly, central storage and routing like a little internet – after planetfall. Perhaps it couldn’t be resealed and filled with air; it was never meant to be a ship again after it landed.

My little village looked like a 1940’s army barracks, all identical, all oriented the same direction, all in a neat three-by-four grid. I thought it was oddly charming there on the Martian plain. When it was finished, I went to work organizing the landing site. Since I had no way of erecting the other big community domes by myself, I arranged pallets against the walls of the existing dome. It was the only shelter-like option available, although I would much rather have had everything under cover.

I did as much of the ship disassembly as I could; much of it was designed to be repurposed, like the forklift, but not by a lone woman. I took detailed inventory. I found things that looked scientific and interesting that I couldn’t identify and didn’t know how to use. I knew where the personal belongings were, but I didn’t dig through any of them. I found a hermetically sealed crate that wasn’t on the manifest; someone had smuggled a cat on board with some kind of clever automated feeding device. The cat had died months before, possibly during lift-off. I wondered if it had been pregnant; it could have been the progenitor of an entire lineage of Martian felines. The idea made me sad and I stowed the container on board where I’d found it.

That night I discovered that mixing the stroganoff and curry entrees resulted, oddly, in something that actually tasted good. Or if not good, then different from what I’d been eating. I put on some soothing synth pop and did an hour’s worth of stretches, wishing I’d thought to stash some incense in my personals. Maybe I had thought of it and rejected it, knowing I’d never burn it if there was a finite supply of it, knowing it would eventually lose its scent and dry out, unused and impossibly rare, in a beige shelter on Mars.

12.

Seventeen weeks after Mars-fall, I had:

A dead spaceship.

A dome full of dead bodies, suits, electronics, and food and water pallets, surrounded by a very orderly stockyard of supplies and ship parts sectioned by fetching little forklift-sized aisles.

A small, empty settlement, regulation-stocked for settlers.

My homestead, complete with homey decorations, a very comfortable sleep shelf, millions of hours of entertainment and reference, a riotously green greenhouse, and a garage for my forklift.

A dead cat. (I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wished it had survived; a house cat would have made an enormous difference in my quality of life.)

A woefully insufficient scientific education.

A restaurant shelter I’d begun to fill with important-looking electronics I didn’t know the uses of.

Parts to make two dozen more forklifts.

Eighteen hundred years worth of rations.

One hundred and fifty years worth of water.

And an infinity of silence.

(Go to chapter 3.)