by Meg Howrey
Mireille stares at Luke, daring him to soothe her, triumphant in the powers of her own delivery—resentful, greedy, and not a fool. At the moment, he cannot think of a single thing to say that would satisfy her, make her feel better, make her be better. After seven months of watching astronauts, it is literally stunning to watch someone fall to disorganized pieces, and then deliberately present rage and resentment, hand it to him on a silver platter, fully cooked, like it’s a gift.
He watches Mireille look smug, then ashamed, then sad. You can see everything on her face, everything.
“You don’t need to say it.” Mireille scrubs punitively at her face. “I know she’s a much better person than me, in pretty much every way you can measure. And that’s why I’m constantly trying to prove that she isn’t. I should just be proud. I’m proud too, you know. It’s all very stupid. God, those poor Chinese.”
Mireille turns her head, occluding his view of her eyes, and effectively drawing down the curtain. In profile, she resembles her mother more strongly.
HELEN
For thousands of years we have wondered about this red disk in the sky, and today, humans take our first steps on the planet Mars. That is what Helen is going to say. She repeats the line in her head. She didn’t write it.
Thousands of years was imprecise, the line would need work.
It was good to mention the color. Across cultures, it was the redness of the thing that had impressed. Ancient Egyptians named it Horus of the Horizon and the Red One, and the Babylonians said it was the Star of Death and called it Nergal, after their deity of fire. In Hebrew it was Ma’adim: one who blushes. Some variation of Fire Star for the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese.
The word wonder was also good. It wasn’t only the color that suggested war to the ancients—it was the strange motion of Mars and the other visible disks that did not behave like the stars, seemingly fixed in the firmament, but advanced and retreated and advanced again along their paths. These disks were given the name planets, meaning wanderers.
And so, yes, for thousands of years we have wondered about this red disk in the sky, and today, humans take our first steps on the planet Mars.
• • •
THEY HAVE ARRIVED.
They can see nothing.
Yoshi is working on restoring the feeds from their external cameras, but just now they have no view. They are three people strapped down inside a tuna can. But otherwise, they are very good: less than a hundred yards east of the landing site, not a bull’s-eye but, considering the distance between thrower and dartboard, a huge success.
Their descent to the Red Planet had not been without a few thrills. They hadn’t been treated to This Is Extremely Bad, but they hadn’t been allowed Best-Case Scenario either, and their entirely automated craft had required manual overrides. In the end, they’d gotten one hell of a yo-yo experience that went by the name Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, a lot of noise, the great sharpening of focus that the feeling of compression gave you, and then, with an almost comical clunk, they were down. Helen cannot touch her face yet since she’s still helmeted, but would like to, would like the reassurance that she still has a face.
It had been sweet, in their first communications, to hear a wild cheering going on in Mission Control. It had been the thing that made Helen and Yoshi and Sergei cheer. Sometimes it took other people going bananas to make you feel something, because you were locked into the groove of hyperalertness and it was all about the next thing, and tumultuous joy wasn’t on the list. There was a practical component to not scheduling exultation. Even when they Gofer, Mission Control will want to hear “Prime, Primitus is on the surface, landing site is secure, all systems are nominal,” and not sounds that could quite easily be misinterpreted as death throes. Whatever portion of the world that will be watching humans land on Mars (and one hopes for at least Super Bowl or Eurovision Grand Final numbers) will need Mission Control for experiencing the landing in emotionally representative terms because they—Helen and Sergei and Yoshi—will be just three calm voices inside spacesuits, confirming systems. Mission Control will be a room full of human beings who have been visibly thumb-bite-y and arm-fold-y and brow-knitted, pale, sweaty, pacing, hollow-eyed. They will say things into a camera like, “This is probably the most significant moment of our entire species” and “Everything I have ever worked for in my life is about this moment right here.” The tension will be almost unbearable. And then, imagine. Imagine the cheers and the turning to one another, hugging, tears on faces, thumping one another on the back, or just leaning back exhausted in their chairs, covering their faces with their hands. Sometimes it’s seeing how much other people care that makes you care. Often, it is that.
It was generous of Mission Control to cheer for them, since no dreams had been achieved yet, and the cheerers have a seven-month-long case of jetlag.
Helen begins to relay a message of gratitude back to Mission Control, but is interrupted by an explosive sound, a deep and very loud cracking boom. Outside their craft, impossible to tell from which direction or how close, but they all look up. Helen discovers that when you are strapped into a seat and cannot move, or run, or see very much, and you think something might be about to fall on your head, your body does a funny accordion bellows–type thing. Shrinking in fear and expanding in defense. Also, she had instinctively tried to stretch out both arms toward Yoshi and Sergei, as if they were passengers in her car.
Nothing falls on their heads.
Helen reports the event to Prime, but Prime can give them no explanation. “Maybe we landed on the Wicked Witch of the West,” Helen messages, though the time delays make jokes a little awkward. All their systems are still nominal. It might have been a Prime employee just outside their module, accidentally tipping over a ladder into a metal trash can, the sound magnified, or some ridiculous situation. Helen pictures a sheepish young man in a Prime hoodie, cringing.
It is one thirty in the afternoon, Mars time. Sol one.
Helen is still thinking through possibilities for the cracking noise, when they receive an audio message from Boone Cross. He tells them that, during the Primitus Entry-Descent-Landing stage, Red Dawn II (the real one) landed successfully.
It was perhaps this that Mission Control had been cheering for. Prime had maybe just played them a recording.
If it is true, if Red Dawn II is on Mars, then Helen and her crew just moved one giant leap closer to the moment when it won’t be Utah outside their nonexistent window. The barriers to Mars are falling and soon there will be no more reasons for why not. Mars is waiting. Mars is waiting for them. For her.
Helen is used to telling herself that she will believe she is going to Mars when she is actually going to Mars, and not before. She repeats this to herself now.
But she feels good. This news will lend a vitality and a pleasing consequence to the simulations. Even though this would only be thirty days, and not the full year and a half of Gofer, they’d still get to work with wonderful things. The M-PRIME plant converting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into oxygen. The H2-PRIME plant providing farm-to-table Martian water. Red Dawns I and II, the nuclear reactors of Red Dawns I and II, making propellant. Containers for the greenhouse assembly. Supply pods. Prime’s Rovers, including the one they brought with them in their own lower stage in case they missed their landing site. She will feel something real under her hands, something new. Everything will need to be checked, inventoried, rechecked, tested. This is why she—they—were chosen. Other types of scientists would spend the entire trip frustrated at the limited opportunities that size, weight, and time gave for doing science. Prime had sent diversely educated engineers because whatever else was going to happen in space, things were going to break. Often.
Now that Helen is so close to relief, she allows herself to acknowledge how much need she has. Helen notes that certain conditions—seven months of confinement, for instance�
��can, when lifted, put you in a state that might be characterized as aggressive. Her impulse, right now, is not to get out and explore, but to get out and conquer. With machines and her bare (well, pressure-gloved) hands. This impulse is probably something Prime should know about, for future crews. Though finding a way to express it without sounding like a scurvy-crazed Christopher Columbus might be challenging. It will probably pass, anyway, the feeling.
Boone Cross’s voice continues—
“I am very sorry to have to tell you that Weilai 3 suffered a catastrophic failure during its launch sequence. A fire broke out in the crew cockpit, and the crew lost their lives. This event occurred eighty seconds after launch. CNSA is not releasing details at this time, though there’s been some suggestion that the fire was caused by an electrical short circuit. This event occurred just as you were preparing for EDL stage. The decision was made to follow the contingency protocol regarding the relay of Earth events of this nature.”
There is a pause and then Cross’s voice continues, toneless now, a press conference voice.
“Throughout the history of our exploration of space, we have had to bear the burden of risk. As we strive to minimize this risk in every conceivable way, we must always accept the possibility of the inconceivable. This acceptance in no way lessens our sadness. Prime Space reaches a hand out to our brothers and sisters at CNSA, and shares the burden of loss with them.”
Helen’s first thought is that this news is a simulation. Prime wants to know how the crew will react and handle the news of a major catastrophe.
Wind. Helen can hear the faintest whisper of wind. So faint that it’s more sensed than heard. But that’s not right. You wouldn’t hear Martian wind in the thin atmosphere of the planet, not from inside Primitus.
The Cross recording is followed now by a message from Dr. Ransom in Life Sciences, who tells them that while Prime followed the protocol about communication during critical phases with the crew, her team had immediately reached out to the astronauts’ family members.
This lets Helen know that the disaster on Weilai 3, at least, is real. Prime can push them to the brink in a variety of ways, but they are not allowed to invent super-scenarios involving family members. Prime can’t run a sim in which Meeps dies, or Los Angeles is wiped out by earthquake. They cannot tell Helen that her daughter was “reached out to” if she wasn’t.
“There are no good moments to relay such tragic news,” Dr. Ransom’s voice continues. “And although we are still in a critical stage of operations, we didn’t want to keep you in the dark any longer than we had to. I’m sure you will be anxious for details on Weilai 3, but we’re learning things very slowly. There’s enormous support for the Chinese coming from all over the world. We’re sure you will want to be a part of that. If there is a statement you would like to make as a crew, we will be happy to relay that for you. If there are individual messages you would like to pass on to family members or friends or colleagues, we can do that too. Either now, or in further drops. Over.”
Everyone receives the news of catastrophe in their own way. The Chinese are already beyond their tears. It was always like that, with the dead.
“Terrible,” Sergei says. This is their crew-only link, although of course it’s not just them listening to it. “At first,” he says, “I thought it was not real. I thought it was simulation.”
“I did as well,” Yoshi says. “It’s perhaps too awful to believe.”
“This is a hard moment,” Helen says. She is commander; she must direct her crew. “This is rough. Perhaps we should take a moment of silence? For the crew of Weilai 3, for their families, for everyone at CNSA?”
As Helen says this, she cannot escape the idea of various members of the Prime staff being quite close. Not just in rooms of the Space Center campus, but standing right outside the walls of their craft, looking and listening. There is something grotesque about taking a moment of respectful silence for astronauts who have died while rocketing to space while Helen and her crew sit inside a simulator pretending to be heroes. Tragedy is always grotesque.
They cannot bow their heads, because of their helmets. Helen closes her eyes.
She has a system already in place for things like this. She takes a moment to let her consciousness comprehend the event—repeating to herself the sentence Weilai 3 suffered a catastrophic failure, killing the entire crew: Yu Chen, Meifeng Guo, He Liu, and Mingli Sheng. As she says the names, she pictures the faces. These people here, she instructs herself, are people who were once alive, and now they are dead. She finds she can take it in. The knowledge, the sadness, is another layer to the atmosphere of her own particular planet, already thickly coated. This, she lives with.
The next thing she would normally do is ask herself what steps she could take: was there an action that might alleviate suffering the event had caused, such as a donation of time or money? Was there a public or private statement she could make that would be meaningful? Once that was accomplished, it was mostly a matter of being aware of how the event might have affected others, being quick to spot and react to these affects.
Keep busy: such a commonplace piece of advice, but the best one. Death, pain, loss, grief. These were as fundamental to life as the elements on the periodic table. You didn’t ask, “Why, God, why?” about the periodic table. Sometimes a new element got discovered. You added it. You got on with it.
She must think about her crew. It was now her crew. What would her crew need? The natural response in these situations was to want information. Dr. Ransom had said that details were slow to come, so presumably everyone was starved of access in that way, but her crew might feel their isolation very strongly. Their isolation is real.
For as long as she’d been an astronaut she’d heard that psychologists were concerned that losing sight of the Earth might cause some kind of ultra-homesickness, even breakdown. Helen had never thought this was likely. Watching Earth “recede” had been interesting, not devastating. Crew cohesion had been maintained without conflict. Helen would not characterize any of her states of mind as depression. It had been a nuisance that she had been repeatedly plagued by bouts of anxiety and strange memories during the voyage out, like contracting a persistent case of eczema or blepharospasm, but it wasn’t significant; it had not affected her work. Helen was conscientious about using the Reaction Self-Tests, and she remained in top form. The only one inconvenienced by her mood was herself, and she could manage herself. In a way it was good that her “trouble” had occurred so early in the mission. Prime was using a mission-concurrent psychological state baseline. The face and voice sensors were less likely to be tipped off to changes in her demeanor since her demeanor had been consistently a little off since day twenty. And she’d prepared. Helen looked forward to the time when she could tell Meeps that those questions Helen had asked her, and Meeps’s answers, had foiled technology.
“You have to smile with your eyes. If you have a smile on your face while you’re talking, whatever you are saying will sound warm and happy, even if the listener can’t see your face. Posture is always a dead giveaway—the body doesn’t lie. I like to imagine my whole face lifting up by an inch. Crossed arms looks defensive, one hand on a hip looks confident. Mom, sometimes you do kind of a singsong cheery voice, and that might get on people’s nerves.”
As for the rest, well, Helen could read data too. For seven months, she’d not wavered significantly in levels of neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, or conscientiousness. She’d not shown signs of asthenia, no weakness of nervous system, no blood pressure instability. She’d been worried about sleep, but she’d slept just fine: averaging 6.44 hours per night. She’d looked forward to sleeping, in a funny way that was new to her. Almost as if she might get a message or clue about this persistent sensation of having missed something important, but no.
A terrible thing has happened.
It was a commonplace: We
are made of star stuff, and to star stuff we will return. That the Chinese astronauts will go to space, perhaps even the Moon, is a nice way to think about it. Helen returns to absorbing the news of the tragedy.
She is prepared for tragedy, equipped. Tragedy is an old companion, you might say, from her youth. Not quite an imaginary friend, but not fully visible either. Borderless. Her daughter thought she shut down in these moments, but it wasn’t that. It was that you had to be so careful with grief. Grief sought connections: it stacked, or swarmed. It was only the first time you experienced sorrow that it stood alone, with nothing attached to it.
Her father hadn’t died on his way to the moon. He’d slipped and hit his head in a national chain grocery store. At first it was only that: your father had an accident. Her nine-year-old imagination worked easily upon the idea of a father who was hurt but would get better; this seemed reasonable, and in proportion to the severity of the accident. Her father had slipped, he hadn’t been in a car or plane crash or shot by criminals. Helen had been instructed to hope and pray. She did so, in much the same way that she loaded the dishwasher when she was told to: uncritically and without the employment of metaphysics. There were things to appreciate about the situation. All the grandparents came, and aunts and uncles. Visits from people they knew from church, more desserts and movies and games and even gifts. Grandpa McInnery showed her how she could look at the sun through shade #14 welder’s glass and told her that if we could look at the sun in space, it would be white, not yellow. Grandpa McInnery let her help him rewire a broken lamp in the TV room. “You’re a Little Miss Fix It,” he said. She remembers that moment very well. The next part was blurry. They’d been brought to the hospital. Their father was not on mechanical life support, he was breathing on his own. He had a feeding tube. Helen was confused by the phrase a doctor used: “awake but not aware.” Grandma McInnery tried to amend this to “sleeping” and muddled things further. Helen knew what “traumatic” meant. She began to worry, and developed a nervous habit of touching the back of her head that would persist for the rest of the year and went unnoticed by her family.
