"Huh." As Mark flopped over to lean his back against the habitat deck bulkhead, Dragonfly joined him in a similar pose. "That's kind of strange. You have the smallest eyes of any of us, but they're also the most fragile."
"Yeah, I've wondered how the ponies get on with those huge eyes of theirs. Probably spend a fortune on eye drops." Mark chuckled. "Allergy season must be a bitch."
Dragonfly blinked again. "Um, no," she said quietly. "I mean, a few ponies have allergies, but it's not like it's crippling or something."
"Oh. Huh."
The conversation lapsed, and Mark shut his eyes, reaching up to rub his temples with one hand.
"Hey, there's a thing you can do that we can't," Dragonfly chirped. "We can't rub both temples at the same time."
"Mmm."
More silence.
"I was wondering," Dragonfly asked, "why don't we move to the cave for the last few sols?" She'd thought about proposing this for weeks now, but this seemed like the time to bring it up.
"Mmm?" Mark didn't open his eyes. "Hadn't thought about it much. First thing I think of, I don't want to move Pathfinder. After what we saw when we opened up Sojourner, I think we were lucky as shit that Pathfinder worked pretty much first time. For all we know, any little bump could kill it. The Hab still has work space, the equipment we're not taking with us, six hydrogen cells for extra power storage, and more safety backups than the cave or the rover. It's still the safest place."
"Yeah, but... well," Dragonfly muttered, a little uncomfortable with her thought, "you're a botanist— a farmer, basically. Doesn't the farm feel more like home?"
Mark snorted, but his eyes stayed shut. "The cave is the most alien place on Mars to me," he said. "Yeah, it has plants. But it's underground, in a giant geode that dwarfs almost anything ever found on Earth, and it runs ninety percent on a force of nature my entire species had relegated to myth." He chuckled and added, "Well, most of us. I hear there are some who think that there are evil magicians among us who cast curses and steal away men's penises."
Dragonfly couldn't hold back her laugh. "What??"
"I could barely say it the first time," Mark said. "Apparently there's this really weird mental disease, a kind of paranoia, that can make a man think his genitals are gone. And then they have to blame somebody, because obviously..." The human began to chuckle uncontrollably, then managed to finish, "... they don't just get up and walk away..."
Dragonfly laughed too, but not as much. "You humans are weird," she said.
"Yeah, probably," Mark said once he calmed down. "But my point is, the Hab feels more like home than anything else here. I trained in a simulation of the Hab for years. And I've spent over a year living in it. The cave is nice, but..."
"The cave is alive," Dragonfly said. "The Hab is dying."
Mark's eyes finally opened. They looked a little sad, staring off at the opposite wall of the compartment. "Yeah, I know," he said. "We're killing it one piece at a time. The life support is down to about eighty percent capacity, give or take, despite my maintenance. We're lucky it has that. It was never meant to last this long with full occupation, much less with full occupation plus a farm."
"Mmm." Humans got a lot of mileage out of grunts as conversational tools, and Dragonfly could see why.
"There's a children's book back home," Mark said. "It's called The Giving Tree. The tree gives the young boy an apple. It gives the older boy a place to hang a swing. When the boy becomes a man, he takes the wood to build a house. And when he's an old man, there's nothing left to take. All the tree has left is its stump, and so the old man sits and rests on that. That's what the Hab feels like to me— a giving tree."
"That... that's so stupid!" Dragonfly snapped. "I want a copy of that book to put in the hive nursery! It's a perfect changeling story! Only instead of `The Giving Tree' we'd call it `The Taking Boy!' That tree gave the same way ponies `give' to changelings!"
"Yeah, you're not the first to notice the story's a little one-sided," Mark said. "But there's another side to it. The stuff the boy took didn't make him happy in the end. In fact, at the end he had nothing except the stump of the tree, because he'd taken and never really gave back. And when he's old, he goes back to where he was young and happy, trying to find that again."
Mark shook his head. "I haven't read the book in so many years, I'm probably messing it up. But I feel bad about how we've looted the Hab. It's one of the reasons why I wanted to help keep the cave going. I can't save the Hab, but maybe I can save that."
"Huh." Dragonfly shifted position. "How are your eyes?"
"They still hurt a bit," Mark said. "Gimme a few more minutes."
"Okay." Dragonfly got up, stretched her legs, and trotted over to her discarded spacesuit. "I'm going back into the Hab for a minute. Want anything?"
"Pill bottle in the medicine chest marked `aspirin'," Mark said. "If you could bring that. Rather not touch the Vicodin unless I have to."
"Okay. Back in a while."
It took time to cycle out the ship's airlock and in via Airlock 2 of the Hab. Once inside, she checked the clock. In about two hours Mark would have to take Rover 2 to the cave to pick up the others— well, Starlight and Fireball, anyway; Cherry and Spitfire would walk back. But for the moment she was alone in the Hab.
The Hab floor was dirty, but no longer dirt. The plants had been carefully transferred to the cave, followed by as much of the cultivated soil as they could shovel up. The cabinets and tables, so shiny and brilliant when the five of them had first entered it the night of Sol 6, now looked dingy, scratched, beaten. The canvas scar left by the blown-out Airlock 1 grabbed and held the eye, reminding Dragonfly of that pony who had worked for the Storm King, what's-her-name. One of the air circulation fans rattled, and another had that high-pitched whine only Dragonfly could hear, warning that its bearing was beginning to fail.
Without the farm— without the castaways— the Hab felt sadder, more tired, than before. If Dragonfly put the sensation into words, it had moved away from I still stand and had edged closer to I once stood. She still didn't know if what she felt was real or some magic-deprivation hallucination, but to her it didn't just feel like the Hab was dying; it felt like the Hab knew it was dying.
"Excuse me," she said, alone in the ninety-two square meter space under the canvas dome. "I, um, just want to say something. We didn't build you. The five of us, I mean, not Mark. We just showed up. You protected us. You warned us when you had trouble. You stood up to frightful things and kept us safe. And now we're taking parts of you so we can go a long way away, and probably never come back."
There was a vague hint that the bug had something's attention. More hallucinations, probably. She felt silly, but she carried on.
"Well, I just want to say that we're grateful for all you've done. And we're sorry, really sorry, for how badly we abused you. You deserved better. You deserved a happier mission, with your proper crew. Instead you got us, and you took care of us. And now you're giving us a chance to live long enough to maybe make it home again."
Dragonfly walked up to the console of the Hab's main computer, the one that monitored all the other equipment, the one too big and inconvenient to take with them to Schiaparelli. She placed a hoof on the side of the console and said, quietly, "Thank you."
And the Hab was happy.
Author's Notes:
In the book Mark Watney explicitly refers to the Hab as the Giving Tree.
And with this, the buffer is out of negative digits and back to zero.
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Sol 415
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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE — MISSION DAY 422
ARES III SOL 415
"Down five kilo, Mark."
"I'm not surprised," Mark replied. "Most of it's probably from my skeleton. Common in low-gravity environments. A little higher than this point in other Ares missions, though."
Spitfire considered this. "Ares mission lasts one year, yeah? This point in other mission, you be home two months now."
"You know what I mean," Mark said. "Come on, your turn on the scale. Everyone else has been."
"Blood pressure," Spitfire said carefully. "Temperature. Reflex. Breathing. You know the drill." That last was a pat phrase from several of the television shows they'd watched, and Spitfire liked it. She liked it even more once drill was explained to her as not being a tool in this particular usage.
The other four castaways had been through the process already. NASA had suggested this to them in the morning's chat. Before long they would no longer have access to the sample scale (nonessential equipment for the cross-country drive to come). This seemed like a good time to do another physical and assess the health of the crew. Blood work was out of the question, of course, but the usual non-invasive diagnostics could still be done.
To no one's surprise, Dragonfly had the worst results thus far, with her body weight down ten whole kilograms below the baseline readings taken three hundred sols before. Mark's loss of five kilograms came in second, but he'd had much more mass to lose than any of the others, even Fireball.
The dragon, incidentally, had actually gained three kilos. There were a couple of jokes about eating rocks, and then they moved on.
Spitfire went on to administer the other tests. Lungs clear, lung capacity undiminished. (Dragonfly was the only one whose breathing had grown weaker.) Temperature normal, heartbeat sound normal. Pulse rate slower, blood pressure slightly lower, both within margins of error according to the database on the Hab computers. In short, Mark was about as healthy as could be expected, right down to the barely visible burn scars on his upper right arm.
Spitfire was silently grateful for one fact: the only illnesses among the crew, aside from varying levels of magic deprivation, had come from injuries. Apparently neither the Equestrians nor the lone human had brought any infectious diseases to wipe out the group.
Or anyway, if they had, they were diseases for which everyone had standard resistance. If Spitfire understood parallel universe theory, the odds of Mark's germs and pony germs being more or less identical were actually not terrible. Of course, most of what Starlight Glimmer babbled about when talking about the two universes made no sense to Spitfire, so she could be wrong.
But that didn't help with her main concern. Mark, by deliberate decision of his bosses, had been isolated for weeks prior to launch to ensure he didn't have a communicable disease to give to his crewmates. The ponies hadn't been as cautious, but their weeks of training came close enough to isolation that it seemed to have worked out the same. But whichever planet the lot of them returned to first, the non-native would have to deal with the full range of disease, and the rest of them would have weakened immune systems from all this time in space.
Put bluntly, when they got back, wherever they got back to, they were all going to be really, really sick.
"Okay, Spitfire," Mark said. "Your turn."
"Fine." Despite her lack of hands, Spitfire had done most of the work so far. But hooves failed to cope with the added difficulty of performing the tests on oneself, so Mark had to step in for this part. She hopped onto the worktable, stepped on the scale— down one and a quarter kilograms, not bad— and then submitted quietly to Mark's careful and cautious movements.
She couldn't resist the ear flick when Mark stuck in the ear thermometer (a much more pleasant tool than the old-fashioned model in the Amicitas medical kit— that dinosaur was getting left behind along with the scale). Mark flinched, and Spitfire's ear-flick became two flattened ears. "Said sorry for kick you," she said crossly.
"And I think my abs forgive you," Mark said. The bruises had faded some, but they were still visible when he took off his shirt. "But I'm still a bit gun-shy."
"Get on with it." Another pat English phrase Spitfire had embraced wholeheartedly, especially since it had fewer syllables than a lot of single English words.
Everything else checked out fine until the last test, the breath capacity test. "How much?" she asked, when she heard the results.
"Twenty percent drop," Mark said. "That's as bad as Dragonfly's."
Spitfire groaned, flopping forward on the table. "No," she said, "it's worse."
"You wanna tell me about it?" Mark asked.
Spitfire snorted. "So you can finish my... sentences... for me? So you can correct me?"
Mark sighed. "Everyone, can you go find something to do in the rover or something?" he asked.
"You sure about that, Mark?" Dragonfly asked. "I think we all know Spitfire can kick your ass, even with only eighty percent of her lungs."
"Out."
Fireball chuckled. "Bug isn't wrong," he said.
"Out, out."
"Come on, everyone," Cherry Berry said. "I'm sure Dragonfly can find us some more wires to inspect. Suit up."
Five minutes later, Spitfire and Mark were seated on a bunk, alone in the Hab. "Okay, we here," she said, not bothering to hide the bitterness. "What you want me say, huh?"
"Well..." Mark seemed to think (for a change) before speaking. "First, how about this? You say what you want in pony, and I'll talk in English. That puts us on a level playing field."
"What?" Spitfire slipped into Equestrian at once. "But you don't understand Equestrian! You certainly can't speak it for crap! That's why we all learned English!"
"I understand more than you think," Mark said. "I'm a bit rusty, since you guys don't go off into huddles so much anymore, but I had a lot of opportunities to listen to you. And seriously, you guys never told me what's so wrong when I try to speak it."
"Remember Filthy Fred?" Spitfire asked. "When you try to speak Equestrian, you sound like that almost all the time."
Mark flinched. "That bad?" he asked.
"Worse. Like walking past drunk stallions at the air show."
"Um... I got walking and males, and something about flying," Mark said.
"What do stallions sound like when sexy mares walk by on your world?"
"What do... ooooh," Mark said, understanding. "I think I see where you're going. I sound like that. I wish you'd said."
"We didn't want to embarrass you."
"Was that embarrass?" Mark chuckled. "Believe me, that ship sailed long ago." He sobered a little and said, "Think we can keep this up now? How about you tell me what your real problem is? I know it's not me talking down to you, because I haven't done that for ages."
