New Mars

A short story by Ruth Waterton about two enduring obsession of Mars Society fanatics: the red planet, and chocolate. Part of the Mars Tales issue.

Chocolate, thought Olive, as she stepped out of the doctor’s surgery. She could probably do it if it wasn’t for chocolate.

Dr Harrison’s verdict had come as no surprise. Angina, aggravated by stress and obesity. The stress was probably an assumption, a natural one in the case of a sixty-two year old woman whose marriage had broken up less than six months ago. Natural, but inaccurate. In many ways Stephen’s departure had been a relief. It had taken her a while to flex her limbs, to realise that she had the freedom now to stay up late, to eat microwave dinners, even to attend church twice on Sundays, without his continual drip-drip of negativity making her question her judgement.

The chocolate had started because of Stephen – more than twenty years ago. After another long day shaped by the preferences of others, it was one of the few treats – oh, why beat about the bush? – addictions, which she could pursue in secret. She’d never felt the slightest wish to become an alcoholic, but she had to admit that the hidden stash of Mars bars at the back of the food cupboard had something of the illicit thrill of the gin bottle in the toilet cistern. And now he’d gone, she indulged it more openly, more scurrilously. Truffles before breakfast. Chocolate biscuits while she cooked the tea – if her appetite was spoiled, so what? There was nobody to please but her.

Pensively, she walked home through the village, a mental map of chocolate. The wholefood shop (glorious American brownies), Fred’s deli (wonderful pain au chocolat, the Cheese Hamlet (choc chip muffins). Could she live without all that? Was it worth bothering? The doctor was right, of course. Both parents dead by sixty-five – one from a stroke, the other from hypertension. The omens weren’t good. She had to lose four stone by Christmas – she still thought in pounds and stones, outdated though it was – an American habit she’d gotten into. “Gotten”! There she went again! How many middle-aged English housewives said, “gotten”? Or “We can deal” (”Deal what?” people said, mystified). All these years, and still the old habits persisted. Dowdy English on the outside. Willowy, savvy American inside her head.

She reached the oversized house which, soon, she would have to contemplate selling, and noticed that the New Mail light was flashing on her communicator screen. Robin? She wondered. No, surely not. It would be five o’clock in the morning in Washington. And that was where he would be, she knew – biting his fingernails down to the quick as he paced the corridors. Waiting for the outcome of the long months of lobbying for a human mission.

Olive eased herself into an armchair and contemplated the gesture of omitting her usual mid morning snack. Mars! She sighed and slipped her shoes off, rubbing one callused foot against the other. There was a time when she’d have stayed up all night, glued to one of the news channels, to hear of Congress’s final decision. Now she just couldn’t face the disappointment, the empty tears alone. Nothing ever turned out the way you wanted it to. Why get up all the emotion for nothing?

But it had been different once. Glancing at the flashing red light, she let her mind travel back twenty-five years. Back to the days when e-mails had to be laboriously typed out letter by letter, when lack of visual link-up had allowed you to spin out a web of illusions – that you were smart and beautiful, and a guy in America saw you as such. You could live for a cause. You could change a world, populate it with domed towns and silver settlements where once there’d been nothing but arid red rocks. For almost two years, her life had been sucked away from home and family into that computer screen, the abode of plans and fantasies. Of course, she knew now that the fantasies weren’t the Martian ones; they were the ones about herself, what she could achieve. And Greg had bought into them – fed them, encouraged them.

No, damn it. Why not tell the truth? He’d believed them. The e-mails that had come back from him had changed the way she saw herself. To Stephen, her life had been one long missing of the mark – postnatal depression instead of contented motherhood, muddled misery instead of intellectual sophistication to impress his friends, foolish spending binges instead of prudent economy. Worst of all, he’d accused her of being a hopeless mother. Filling Robin’s head with dreams of space exploration, encouraged him to apply for the International Space University, and ultimately NASA.

Original message: Olive Barry, “Robin says he wants to work for NASA when he grows up. I’ve told him what my friends went through with US immigration. Stephen thinks the whole idea’s ridiculous. Do you think I should encourage him?”

Reply: Greg Prelewski, “NASA! Fantastic! Go for it!”

Of course, Stephen had been suspicious of the whole friendship. Okay, he’d had some justification, perhaps. They’d pushed the envelope a little bit, flirting not only with each other, but with the cultural differences that had so intrigued them both. Maybe that was what Stephen had hated so much. He liked to think that, after all his high-powered business trips, he was the expert on the States.

Hadn’t liked it when she’d told him his assumptions had no basis in reality. But for all that, he’d had no right to treat her like a child. To close down the ISP account and never even tell her. Typical.

And she’d fought back. God, that had surprised him! That she, the technical illiterate who couldn’t even send an e-mail without asking his advice, had shopped around for the best deal and found a cheaper ISP. That undaunted by the jargon of incoming and outcoming servers, she’d installed her own copy of Outlook Express and got her lifeline up and running. Haha! The worm had turned!

Not for long, though. Stephen had won in the end. Once he saw that photograph of Greg and her together in Boulder – never mind that the Iguana was as public as a parking lot and a dozen other people were there – that had freaked him. Or maybe he’d figured out her security codes and caught up on the e-mail while she was away … So it stopped. The late night Internet sessions. The subscriptions to American journals. The parcels of books from LA. She turned her back on Mars, and him, and took a course in flower arranging.

Olive unwrapped a Kit-Kat, and sat with the plastifoil crushed in one hand, remembering. She reached forward and pushed the Message button. And heard, to her utter amazement, the easy-going West Coast accent she’d never forgotten. “Hey, Olive? You never told me Rob made it into NASA. Lobbying, huh? You always said he could talk you into anything. Well, seems like I owe you one. You still up for it? You coming out to the launch?”

Olive leapt out of her chair. Twenty years fell away, and tears burst from her eyes as she hit the buttons on the remote control. SEARCH function. Spacenews.com. Live from Capitol Hill. There was a roomful of people going crazy – whooping, cheering. Someone at the back was yelling, “On to Mars! We did it! On to Mars!!”

“WHEN?” she screamed to an empty room. “WHEN?”

They were talking timescales, showing graphs. Five years! Could they really be ready for launch by then? Oh Greg – you remembered! You remembered a call from a foolish, gushing English lady with a massive crush on you – a lady daft enough to say, “Right, now you’ve got the Mars Society job, I want you to promise me something … I want to be in the front row beside you for the launch!”

And he’d laughed. The way he’d laughed today. Maybe if she watched a little longer, she would see him? The corporation he’d set up in his spare bedroom was quite a player in space these days, she’d heard. Oh yes, he’d be there.

But first of all, she had something to do.

Switching the news feed through to the kitchen, she walked through and dropped the untouched Kit Kat into the rubbish disposal chute. After barely a moment’s hesitation, she opened her treats cupboard and threw in the six Mars bars after it, one by one.

Ruth Waterton is a freelance writer and chocolate addict in recovery, based in Manchester, United Kingdom.

Filed under: Fiction on August 7th, 2001