Dead on Mars

The sun rose once again across the sparse desert as Tang Yue finished moving the solar panels. He sat amid the Battery Farm and looked into the distant land.

This made Tang Yue recall the Taklamakan Desert. During his training, he and Old Wang had gone to Lop Nur, one of the places on Earth with the closest environment to Mars. The two had set up a tent in the desert as they looked up at the starry sky. As they were so far from human civilization, the milky way displayed itself over their heads with full grandeur. Old Wang pointed at the desert and asked if he knew Peng Jiamu. Peng Jiamu was a biochemist and explorer who had died there.

Back then, Tang Yue tried imagining a deserted planet, but as an Earthling, he found it hard to imagine what kind of desert would be big enough to prevent him from walking out.

Now, he had seen for himself the truly boundless desert.

“Tang Yue, the tomato seeds have been scooped up.” Tomcat’s voice sounded in the earpiece. “They are being dried and they look to be in good condition.”

“Tomcat, have you read ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?’” Tang Yue asked.

“The book by Douglas Adams?” Tomcat asked. “I can recite the book perfectly, as well as in thirty different languages.”

“In the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, there’s a book named ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,’” Tang Yue said. “Do you think we are considered a restaurant at the end of the Universe?”

“The problem is that we aren’t a restaurant.” Tomcat shook its head. “With Kunlun Station’s conditions, it can only be called the toilet at the end of the Universe. How’s this slogan: Before the Universe is destroyed, have a p*ss before leaving. Don’t keep it in while heading to the Underworld.”

Tang Yue rolled his eyes.

“I’m just saying that Kunlun Station is very lonely. Here I sit, watching it, feeling that it can stand here for all eternity until the world ends.”

“Isn’t the Eagle accompanying it?” Tomcat said. “These two won’t get sick of each other. They will probably stay together to watch the end of the world.”

Tang Yue turned his head to look at the distant Eagle. The Descent Vehicle remained firmly erect. Even Tang Yue didn’t know how long the Eagle could remain standing. Due to its reinforced alloy materials, it would take a long time to disintegrate. Before the Eagle collapsed, it was certain that it would be buried by the sandstorms.

After being buried, the Eagle would stay in its spot for a long time.

“Do you know the story about the Khodovarikha Meteorological Station and Slava?” Tomcat asked.

“What’s that?”

“It was once a meteorological station by the side of Russia’s Pechora Sea located within the arctic circle. It was the most remote meteorological station in the world. The nearest city to it needed an hour’s flight by helicopter,” Tomcat explained. “Slava was the only meteorologist in the station. He worked there for thirteen years and the only person accompanying him was a parrot.”

Tang Yue was taken aback.

“Later, a photographer went to the Khodovarikha Meteorological Station to visit Slava. That was in 2014, and Slava was then a man in his sixties. The photographer was astonished that the place seemed frozen in time. The walls were covered with Soviet-era wallpaper, and there wasn’t any telephone or Internet. Slava used Morse code to maintain communications with the outside world. It was basically an island isolated from the world. There was only an old lighthouse, an old man, and a parrot.”

Tang Yue imagined the old man spending his long nights alone under the dim lights, listening to the broadcast from a radio, completely separated from the noisy outside world.

Time often passed slowly on certain matters with time unable to leave its mark. For instance, the old man or a tomb. In the arctic circle, even the switching between night and day took a long time. In the extremely long days and nights, the elder named Slava guarded a wall, a bird, and an old lighthouse. He led an unimaginable life and stayed there in silence.

“That old man’s truly impressive,” Tang Yue said softly.

“Actually, I think loneliness and being single is the same.” Tomcat rubbed salt into Tang Yue’s wounds. “You get used to it after some time.”

“Has he never thought of leaving?” Tang Yue asked. “Slava.”

“He is a meteorologist, and that’s the kind of job it is. They often enter the harshest environments that most people are unable to enter, for example, the polar stations or people who fly into the eye of a hurricane with a plane or people who fly to Mars on a spacecraft. In a certain sense, you are the same kind of person as Slava. Both of you are watchmen.”

Tang Yue was taken aback, failing to comprehend what it meant.

“What do you mean by watchmen?”

“On Mars, what do we see when we sit down and look around?” Tomcat asked loudly. “We will see a mote of dust of little importance. But every person you love, every person you know, every person you heard of, every person in history, had completed their lives through it!”

“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam ¹ .”

It was unknown which book Tomcat was reciting from as his voice was filled with agitation.

“What you see is Earth, all of humanity, all that is good and evil, all races of different skin color. You are the only one watching all of humanity in human history.”

Tang Yue grabbed some soil from his feet and fell into a daze. He was at a loss for words. He felt that Tomcat seemed to be placing him on a pedestal… He was merely a nobody who was lucky enough to survive. What made him qualified to be the watchman of human civilization?

Tomcat had never thought so highly of him. He found it baffling to have such a lofty title of being human civilization’s watchman which sounded mysterious and unfathomable. In the past, Tomcat had often called him a sh*t-making machine who was good for nothing.

“Then, you lost Earth.” Tomcat smacked its paws. “Miss Mai Dong, the seeds are dry. What do we do next?”

Tang Yue nearly had a cardiac arrest. In a few sentences, the cat had blamed Earth’s disappearance on him.

He sat in the sand with the erect solar panels beside him.

Tang Yue woke up early every day and often sat in front of Kunlun Station to watch the sunrise. The sunrise on Mars was much smaller than on Lop Nur, but it looked brighter. Perhaps it was because of atmospheric scattering.

The poet, Su Shi, once said: “though thousands of miles apart, we are still able to share the beauty of the moon together.” It meant that no matter where anyone was, they would see the same moon, and one could share the same memories with the moon despite the distance. The sun that Tang Yue was looking at was still the same sun, but the people who should have seen the same sun with him were no longer around.

He was clearly just a survivor, but for some reason, he felt as if he was being abandoned.

Tang Yue sighed. The sun had already risen, so he got up, and returned to the Hab in preparation to continue planting tomatoes.