On Mars, everyone truly finds their level

Growing up, my hero was Gaal Kodell, the space-man. He was the first colonial, I think, to truly make an impact here at home. My parents always thought space was silly, an affectation, a fetish. It was the pet project of that class of billionaire oligarchs that my parents despised.

But then Gaal Kodell emerged suddenly onto our social media feeds. A man born and raised in space, coming to our planet for the first time. And yet coming here fully formed, with smoldering lips and a straight nose, like the image of a superhero from a comic book.

He was a frontiersman: he could fly, shoot, engineer, and code. He was unimpressed by the Earth's scientific academies; instead he insisted on being squired to its historical sites. To the pyramids. To Macchu Pichu, to the Vatican, to Bethlehem.

"The ground where Christ walked can never be superseded," he said. And even his Christianity was firm, otherworldly. He had come to Earth not for our knowledge or wisdom, but only to bask in our sense of history.

I wanted so deeply to become like him. To believe in his vision of human excellence, and his vision that humanity could expand endlessly, ceaselessly, conquering new frontiers and bringing them into submission.

He said on Mars there was no racism, no xenophobia, no sexism. All that mattered was pure ability. If you could do the work, then you would be recognized and rewarded in proportion to your merits.

And this was rhetoric I'd heard all my life! I was American, after all. But it'd always been delivered with a caveat or a smirk or a qualification. With Kodell that wasn't the case: he genuinely believed the best would rise.

As a college student, I took the examination for emigration, and I scored in the ninety-ninth percentile.

I was anxious when I showed up at the Mars Academy for orientation, but immediately I was put at ease. Everyone here was like me: they were mostly Asians, from immigrant families, raised in America to study hard, only to realize at age eighteen that we weren't quite polished enough to get into the Harvards and MITs of the world.

But apparently with this test the hype was true. It couldn't be gamed. It was delivered impartially. The barrier to entry was simply the fact that...this was hard. It was a one-way trip. Mars had sent Gaal back at great expense, but they couldn't afford to do that for a mere plebe.

We were familiar, of course, with the idea that Gaal might be spouting lies. My mom said, "Immigrating is difficult! And to do it with no return home? What if it is like...like the coolie laborers...what if you are indentured? Nobody does anything for free. There is immense expense in exporting you."

"Let him go," my father said. "Let him go. I agree with you, it will probably become miserable—most things are miserable. But who can refuse such an offer? Perhaps you will die out there. Perhaps you will be enslaved. But perhaps you will return rich, like, a Carnegie! He has done the research, let him go. Let him go."

Obviously, it was indentured servitude. We had known it would feel like that, but we hadn't known precisely what that would feel like. To be at the mercy of the overseers of these large ice-farms, harvesting deuterium for resale to passing fusion ships—we were subjected to frightening, inhuman conditions. Made responsible for teams of water-harvesters and forced to work alone, in the field, without support, for months at a time. We bottled our own air, grew our own food, and had to beg our masters for basic provisions to keep their machines from going silent and losing all they'd earned.

On our recorded calls, my mother would say, "It sounds like you've been alone too long. Do they give you no vacations? Is there no law?"

I had money, but nothing to spend it on. My boss, Mr. Devers, kept saying to save up and buy some land from him—he’d take my wages as down-payment on a loan.

"Soon enough you’ll be running some harvesters on your own account." he said. "I started out with just what you did."

And that was true, but he'd also married a Martian woman. And that is, ultimately, what most of the white immigrants did.

There weren't a lot of women here, particularly South Asian women. Lots of Indian men, no Indian women. But there was a society here of middle-class people that knew we were a good prospect. I was lucky. My range had a good homestead in it: a Tamilian engineer, Mr. Ramaswamy, and his Telugu wife, they worked as caretakers for a plantation owned by foreign investors, and they were happy enough to put me up, take me into town, introduce me to the families of other homesteaders.

And this man, Mr. Ramaswamy, told me to politely refuse my bosses offer for help: “Devers’ land is no good, he stripped the ice from those fields long before you came.”

Instead Mr. Ramaswamy helped me to identify a range with good soil. I'd run 2H plantations for several years now, going to heroic ends to keep these machines running without anything in the way of spare parts. So I took the plunge, and I ordered my own harvesters from Earth. Everyone was so excited, so supportive, that I started to think, "Is this a pyramid scheme?"

And it helped to have my mentor, Mr. Ramaswamy, who could say, "No I understand your reservations. There have been many broken promises already. That Devers would have destroyed you, kept you in debt. But my plan is different. This can happen. This is an actuality. You could have your own plantation before too long."

And yes it was work, and there were troubles. At one point the bank refused me credit to buy a new harvester, and I went hat in hand to Mr. Devers, asking for his signature on a note. My old boss said, "I am sorry. But if you have already mismanaged your affairs in such a short time, then I do not see how I could be said to..." This man talked like that, in such a pompous way, going on and on, rejecting me at length.

Thankfully, Mr. Ramaswamy’s friendship counted for much, and he at least would cosign my loans. This community came together, to help me. After a few years, the price of 2H soared. I paid off all my loans and became a backer, with Mr. Ramaswamy’s, of the Small Harvester's Bank.

I laughed now, seeing he hadn't been altruistic at all, helping me.

"What?" he said one night, while I was drinking in his cabin. He pounded me on the back. "What is so funny?"

"It was a good investment," I said. "Helping me. It was a good investment. You made a lot of money!"

"Yes!" he said. "A twenty percent return. And I sold you the harvester too. And I was your agent in purchasing the land, I got a commission for that sale. I am a leech. You are a leech. We are leeches together now.”

"No, no, we are middlemen."

"Maybe!" he said. "But go talk to Dasgupta, who went bankrupt last year and was forced to beg his overseer for his old job, I am sure we are leeches in his eyes."

"It's true," I said. "But he was no good. He just wasn't...good enough."

"Yes. But you mustn't say it. On Mars, everyone truly finds their level. The whites are right!"

"No no no," I said. "That is not correct. These white families had wealth back home. They arrived here with an advantage. Now their children have an advantage."

"Yes, yes, and our children will have an advantage too. The whites are more right than wrong."

"But now they have been saying this for three hundred years! For three hundred years we've been doing this—following behind their empire and making money, always thinking somehow we'll get on top."

"Oh no no no, we will never be on top. Do you remember that spaceman, that spaceman who was sent back, Gaal?"

Now the two of us were chortling, red-faced, deep in our cups. Because of our business concerns, we could only meet in person every few months, and whenever that happened, we'd commence with orgies of drinking, laughter, back-slapping, tears, regrets and cynical remarks.

"No, no, I loved Gaal. Gaal was beautiful," I said. "Gaal is why I came to Mars."

"You and every other child. You are not special. All the children loved Gaal. All the engineers want to be Gaal. So brilliant, Magistrate Gaal. Senator Gaal. Wonderful man. But...are your children going to be Gaal?"

"No!"

"Yes, because that would be absurd! How do we explain to them that there's no good, there's no sense in trying to project such a powerful, manly image. Just focus on making money. How do we do that?"

"We can't!" I said. "That's exactly what I rejected! My own parents' careerism and small-mindedness. That's why I'm here. Oh my god, what a trap. No, no, maybe there's something here. Maybe this is it's own pattern. It's been three hundred years of this! I'm from America. That's not India. I'm not from India. My parents didn't even come straight from India. They were in Africa first! And there's so many people like that here. Like, like...Liang. He's from Indonesia, but really he's Chinese. Like, he's from this minority inside Indonesia. Oh my god, it's so funny. But this is...this is a pattern. Someday someone will study this. At some point folks are going to wake up and realize, wait a second why are there Indian people on Mars! Did India colonize Mars? Somehow there is a distinct community of Indian people here on Mars! And they have a considerable amount of wealth. How did this happen?"

These are the kinds of things that Ramaswamy and I would laugh about.

Anyway, my kids went to school with many Gaal Kodell-types. And my kids got very into dismantling racism and all that stuff. Great stuff. I highly support that stuff. Eventually, the people of Mars will get tired of us. They'll be like why do Indian people have so much! And then we'll go someplace else, lured there by the promise of a world without racism and xenophobia.

Definitely good to not have those things. Racism is very bad. I agree. One of my kids wants to ship out to Jupiter. I tell him we're already on Mars, and you want to go to Jupiter? Do you know how funny that is? We just got here!

And of course I know it doesn't always turn out well. Lots of people got swindled. Lots of people killed themselves. Lots of people starved or suffocated on lonely outposts, still begging with their last breaths for their overseers to send help. There’s a lot of pain that lurks behind these stories. It’s not—not good to be at some man’s mercy, and you can’t trust him, and he’s trying to cheat you, and what’s at stake is your life and your future, and he doesn’t do well by you. And he died a judge, Mr. Devers, with a plaque in our town hall. I spoke at his retirement; we’d done business together, often-enough. And he was a worm. A slime-mold, who never paid for the lives he took and ruined amidst those fucking rocks. But I defeated him, and now I have the last word, and his name is in my mouth, and I get to determine how he’s remembered. And these white men, when I say what he did, they hate me a little bit, but they remember. They remember what they, and what this planet, stood for.

If he stays, my son won’t ever experience what I did. But still, I hope he goes. Even though I’m sure out on Jupiter there is some other Mr. Devers, who’ll stand in judgement over my boy. Still, I hope he’ll go. Perhaps he’ll die or end up enslaved, but perhaps he’ll become rich as a Carnegie. You never know.

The above story is an intense homage to the work of Isaac Asimov.

Afterword

This story was inspired by a rant that recently went viral on Twitter. Poor kid. I am Indian, and all my life I've been hearing people complain like this. There’s no evidence that this kid is Indian, but the whole rant is very Indian-coded—he sounds like every other poster on college-confidential.com back in 2003 when I was applying to colleges.

If you work hard, and you don't get into a good college, it's natural to feel betrayed. And yeah yeah lots of the comments are like, “This kid just seems like every other grind who applies to MIT.” Great…but maybe MIT sucks then! Screw MIT if it can’t recognize a hard-working kid.

That’s the whole point of the frontier. You test your skills and competence by matching yourself against nature. And Indian people have been traveling to new countries to make their fortune for hundreds of years now! I have no doubt that America will not be the final stop for many Indians, because I guarantee you, if there was a test that would both stick it to MIT and allow you to leave this planet, then I know a lot of Indian people who would study hard and ace it.

---

The Art of the Tale

Now that I’m re-committing to the tale format, I also thought I’d periodically include a few thoughts about the nature of this type of storytelling.

I am very fond of this particular tale, and I considered sending it to sci-fi journals. But I would probably have had a very hard time selling it to my usual outlets. This story is so impressionistic, it's not strongly rooted in visual or sense detail, and it also doesn't pay off in expected ways.

Basically, this story is nothing like a story. It uses some of the techniques we're familiar with from fiction: a first-person persona that you can't identify with the author of the tale. And it's presented to you in a format, my newsletter, where you've come to expect stories that have a fiction-like quality. But...it doesn't really feel like a fiction.

Most of my published stories have looked quite different from the story above. In almost all of them, I anchored the reader firmly in a given time and place, and I led them through some sequence of events, in the hope that the experience would cohere in a moment of stunned emotion that was somehow both inevitable and unexpected.

Traditional short stories tend to lack an awareness of the reader as a living presence. That's because these stories insist quite strongly on the reader's complete and immediate commitment.

The reader needs to enter fully into a traditional story, giving over their consciousness to this living dream. And that's something the reader will only do if: a) they already trust the writer; or b) they trust the magazine or journal's judgement enough that they're willing to consider the possibility that a story might be worthwhile, just because it happens to be published in this place.

And when I think about short stories, I'm usually thinking about that cathedral of possibility. That desire to gain the reader's mind and turn their attention onto an object of my choosing.

Fictionality is not the most important part of the short story experience: the important part is that there is an experience at all—a feeling that something transformative might actually happen.

My stories are different from traditional fiction in that they don't make an overt, immediate demand that you believe in the reality of this fiction. You're not inhabiting this tale; you're just being told about it.

But there's a way in which the tale's breeziness also makes it more realistic. That's the magic. You don't actually need to describe the red rocks and the soaring vistas of Olympus Mons. That's not how you put us on Mars. Instead you put us there by just...assuming that's where we are! Write to us just as easily as you would if we we were all on Mars together, talking about current events.

When I describe the tale format to people, sometimes they get defensive. Oh, I want to write things that demand the reader’s full, unyielding attention. Okay…but that insistence that the reader enter fully into the fictional dream is somewhat unrealistic, because readers don’t want to give their full attention to something unless they know it’s good. This means that if something that’s impenetrable except to someone’s full attention then people won’t read it, and nobody will ever know that it’s worth reading.

Meanwhile, the tale format has its own advantages, both in terms of generating verisimilitude and in terms of allowing you a much greater scope for telling your story. In practice, it would be almost impossible to tell a traditional story in under 2000 words that spans two planets, thirty years, and has four named characters. By doing things that no short story is able to do, the tale justifies its own existence as a tale, rather than a story. I would never even attempt to tell this story as a traditional fiction, because it would be impossible, setting the scene would take up too much energy, and the reader would soon become bored.

Elsewhere on the internet…

The second part of my dialogue with

Daniel Oppenheimer

is up. Today we spend some time discussing race, through the hypothetical example of a white woman named Janine who is a committed anti-racist:

Let’s also say, just for the sake of debate, that Janine has a modicum of power and that she’s still able to block the promotions of people who she considers to be racist. Janine has many people amongst the students in this department who agree with her. They consider this department, this whole discipline, to be a tool of structural oppression, and they would like to transform it so that it actively focuses on combating racial disparities.