Die on Mars

The lonely sun once again rose from the vast desert. Tang Yue finished moving the battery panels and sat in the battery farm, looking at the barren land in the distance.

This reminded Tang Yue of the Taklimakan Desert. When he was training, he and Lao Wang went to Lop Nur. It was probably the place with the environment closest to Mars on the earth. The two of them set up a tent in the desert and looked up at the stars. Because they were far away from people, the sky above their heads was It is the majestic and dazzling Milky Way. Under the Milky Way, Lao Wang pointed to the desert and said, "Do you know Peng Jiamu?" Peng Jiamu died here.

Tang Yue tried to imagine a planet full of wasteland, but as an earthling, it was difficult for him to imagine what kind of desert would be too big to walk out of.

Now he saw with his own eyes the truly endless desert.

"Tang Yue, I have fished out all the tomato seeds." The old cat's voice came from the earphones, "They are drying. They are in good condition."

"Old Cat, have you read the book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"?" Tang Yue asked.

"The one written by Douglas Adams?" the old cat said, "I can recite it to you verbatim, in thirty languages ​​without duplication."

"In the series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," there is a book called "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe." Tang Yue said, "Do you think we are the restaurant at the end of the universe?"

"The problem is that we are not a restaurant." The old cat shook his head. "With the conditions of Kunlun Station, we can only call it the toilet at the end of the universe - before the universe is destroyed, you should pee before leaving, so as not to pee urgently on the road."

Tang Yue rolled his eyes.

"I just said that Kunlun Station is very lonely. I sit here and look at it like this, and I feel like it can continue to stand like this, standing until the end of the world."

"Isn't there the Eagle spaceship accompanying it?" Old Cat said, "These two guys should never get tired of watching each other and see each other's end of the world."

Tang Yue turned to look at the Eagle spacecraft in the distance. The descent stage was still standing there firmly. Even Tang Yue didn't know how long the Eagle spacecraft could still stand. It was made of high-strength composite materials and metals. The disintegration of these materials takes an extremely long time. Before the Eagle spacecraft collapsed, it must have been buried by wind and sand.

After being buried, the Eagle spacecraft will still stand for a long time.

"Do you know the story of the Khodovarikh weather station and Slava?" the old cat asked.

"What it is?"

"It used to be a weather station on the Pechora River in Russia, located in the Arctic Circle. It was the most remote weather station in the world. It is an hour's helicopter flight away from the nearest town." Old Cat said, " Slava was the only observer at the weather station, and he worked there for thirteen years, with his only companion being a parrot."

Tang Yue was stunned for a moment.

"Later, a photographer visited Slava at the Khodovarikh weather station. That was in 2014. Slava was already in his sixties at the time. The photographer was surprised to find that time in the weather station seemed to have frozen - The walls are covered with wallpaper from the Soviet era. There is no phone or Internet. Slava uses Morse code to communicate with the outside world." The old cat continued, "It was simply an isolated island with only an old lighthouse and an old man. And a parrot.”

Tang Yue imagined an old man watching the long night, sitting under the dim light and listening to the broadcast on the radio, separated from the bustling and noisy outside world by thousands of mountains and rivers of ice and snow.

For some things, time always passes very slowly, and time cannot leave traces, such as old people, such as tombstones. In the Arctic Circle, even the change of day and night is very slow. In the long polar day and polar night, that name Guarding a wall, a bird and an old lighthouse for the old man in Slava, he lived a life unimaginable by ordinary people and stayed where he was, quietly and indifferently.

"The old man is so awesome." Tang Yue said softly.

"Actually, I think loneliness and being single are the same." Old Mao stabbed Tang Yue again, "As time goes by, you will get used to it."

"Hasn't he thought about leaving?" Tang Yue asked, "That Swara."

"Is he a weather observer? Weather observers are such a profession. They often go deep into harsh environments that are inaccessible to ordinary people, such as isolated polar observation stations, or fly a plane deep into the eye of a hurricane, or take a spaceship to Mars - -In a sense, you are also an observer, the same type of person as Slava, you are both watchers." said the old cat.

Tang Yue was startled and didn't understand what this meant.

"What is a Watcher?"

"On Mars, if we sit down and watch, what will we see?" the old cat said loudly, "We can see an insignificant speck of dust - but everyone you love, everyone you have ever known , everyone who has ever heard of it, everyone in history, has lived their life on it!”

"All the joy and pain in our history, the millions of self-righteous religions, the different ideologies, the ever-changing economic ideas, all the hunters and robbers! All the heroes and cowards! All the builders and destroyers of civilization! All emperors and commoners, all lovers, all parents and children, all great inventors and explorers, all politicians, stars, leaders, all saints and sinners, once lived here - a star suspended in Motes of dust in the sun.”

Old Mao didn't know what lines he was reciting, and his voice was impassioned.

"What you see is the earth, all mankind, all morality and evil, all races and colors. You are the only person in human history who watches over all mankind."

Tang Yue grabbed a handful of soil at his feet and was a little dazed. He didn't know what to say. He felt that the old cat was really flattering him... He was just a nobody who survived. How could he become the watchman of human civilization? Or?

The old cat has never had such a high opinion of himself. The title of "Watcher of Human Civilization", which is so high-end, classy and mysterious, is actually placed on his head. In the past, he has always been a useless manure maker in the eyes of the old cat.

"Then you lost the earth." The old cat clapped his hands, "Miss Ophiopogon japonicus, the seeds are dry, what should we do next?"

Tang Yue almost had a myocardial infarction, and the cat threw the cauldron of the earth's disappearance onto his head in just three words.

He sat on the sand with solar panels set up next to him.

Tang Yue gets up very early every day and often sits in front of Kunlun Station to watch the sunrise. The sunrise on Mars is slightly smaller than that on Lop Nur, but it looks brighter. This may be due to atmospheric scattering.

Su Shi once said in a poem that he hopes that people will live forever and share the beauty of the moon thousands of miles away. This means that no matter where we are, all we see is the same moon. Although we are thousands of miles away from each other, we can send our memories in the moon palace. The sun Tang Yue saw at this moment was still the same sun, but the people who were supposed to see the same sun as him were no longer there.

He was clearly a survivor, but somehow he felt abandoned.

Tang Yue sighed. The sun had fully risen. He patted his butt and got up, returning to Kunlun Station to prepare to continue planting tomatoes.

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(Author’s note: The old cat’s lines in the article come from Mr. Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot—Looking toward Humanity’s Space Home”)