Mars needs poets

Petyr slumps into the kitchen, his Velcro strips noisily fixing his body to the wall. “Sadness is upon me,” he says, looking more crumpled than his unwashed navy blue jumpsuit.

We’re halfway to Mars on a mission to set up the habitats that were sent ahead of us; to start the greenhouses, solar panels and CO₂ converters for the first big wave of colonists.

So far, we’ve dealt with an electric fire in a refrigeration unit and swapped out a faulty antenna.

Wondering what will fail next keeps me from sleeping.

Now that I know what it is, I wish it were anything else.

“I look at the calendar.” Petyr’s shoulders tense, rising in his suit. “March, it screams, and my body’s looking for the crispness of a spring day, the chirping of birds, a warm drizzle to raise the green and the flowers, the earthiness of a stroll in the cool of a promising morn. Even the misery of dirty, melting snow.”

I glance at Sonia, my second-in-command and our engineering specialist; her attention is all on Petyr. We’d been sharing a meal of chickpea, tomato and quinoa chilli paste — one of my favourite meals, if that says anything. Karina, the fourth of our crew, is in her quarters, her turn to sleep.

“You miss the seasons?” I offer.

“Miss them? There’s none of that here, millions of miles from Earth, and there’s not going to be any.”

Despite our preparation, training and expectations, they’d warned us something like this could happen, even if they didn’t know what ‘this’ would be.

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My commander’s mind utters the first, the most obvious, option. “What about the VR channels? I’ve been spending more time wandering the Costa Rica cloud forest lately. That zip line, it gets my heart racing.”

“The heart knows what the eyes can’t see.”

I cycle through other ways to fix the problem. Reach out to mission control for advice. Get the AI docbot to work with him, work with us, because a problem with one is a problem with all. Maybe he needs more downtime. Maybe less. Have the drug printer whip up a solution.

“Petyr,” Sonia says, and I bristle; saying the wrong thing could jeopardize our mission.

I start to raise my hand, signal her to stop, but I’m too slow, churning through my options, to interrupt.

“I miss the seasons, too,” she says. “The southern California sun and surf, the never-dying warmth, the sand rough on my skin. Trips up to Big Bear to escape the heat, to smell the pines and hear the crunch of their needles underfoot.”

My chest constricts. I’ve lost half the crew.

“Poets talk about weather and seasons as if those events reflect our feelings.” She puts the tips of her fingers together, almost in prayer. “Maybe it’s the other way around, and our souls need those rhythms, expect those changes.”

This definitely wasn’t covered in any training manual.

“I’ve been listening, Petyr. Listening real close to our ship. The seasons are smaller, our weather more subtle. The saltiness in the air when Karina finishes her workout. The threat like a hurricane when the air-circulation system suddenly ramps up and blows up dust — the skin cells we shed. The shocking alert that warns of a solar storm. The rustling of drawers before and after our meals. The distinct echoes our bodies make as we move through the ship, like when you double tap your left hand as you wind through a corridor.”

Petyr’s shoulders relax. “I do that, don’t I?” He puts a hand on the table.

I push his food tube closer to him.

“It’s not the same.” Sonia smiles, lighting up her face. “Out here, it shouldn’t be. We just have to pay a different kind of attention to the rhythms around us.” She pauses and touches the table, mirroring Petyr. “You know what excites me?”

Petyr shakes his head.

“That we’ll be the first to experience the weather on the surface of Mars. What sounds will we hear? How will the dust storms look as they approach from the horizon? What emotions will grab us as it shakes our habitats and our bones? I want to feel the shifting of the soil beneath our boots. I want to bring a sample in and, when George isn’t looking,” she nods dismissively at me, “rub it my hands and sprinkle it on the floor and dance barefoot on it.”

Petyr chuckles.

In preparing to lead this mission, I worried over the technical qualifications of the crew. The years of expertise in engineering and mechanics and biology and physics and geology. The thousands of hours of flight and habitat time. The scores on dozens of mission-critical tests and retests.

That Sonia’s a poet, threaded among her many qualifications, didn’t factor once into my assessments.

“Want to go look at Mars?” she asks, a question that’s not mine to answer.

“Sure,” Petyr says.

“Go on,” I say. “I’ll clean up.”

It’s a relief I didn’t know I needed. It won’t be the last time Sonia will save this mission.

In my next post to mission control, I’ll be sure to tell them: Mars needs poets.