The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  Difficult to describe Helen, even after seven months. More difficult after seven months. Yoshi has never spent so many consecutive days in the presence of a woman. Well, his mother, during his childhood, but that was different. Yoshi has been married for eight years, but it is unusual for them to be in the same place for two or three months without some interruption.

  Helen straightens her shoulders and sits back, an indication that it is probably okay to interrupt her.

  “Helen, was this script written for you?” Yoshi asks. “I have just read this word: bulge-y.”

  “It was,” Helen says. “But I’ve noticed that talking about satellites brings out the poet in you and I thought you’d give it more flair. Feel free to make the text your own. How about instead of bulge-y, you say . . .” She pauses and then, with mock seriousness and an imitation of Yoshi’s British-inflected accent, “Excessively protuberant.”

  “Ha. Yes. Good,” Sergei says.

  “Excessively protuberant.” Yoshi pretends to type this in and then mimics his own accent. “Right-o. Jolly good. Tickety-boo.”

  Helen flexes and closes her hands, rolls her shoulders. “Okay. We should get the last uplink from Ground in ten minutes, but I don’t anticipate any changes. Most of tomorrow is about prepping Rover I for Arsia Mons.”

  “Ah, we decided about ‘tomorrow,’ then?” Yoshi asks.

  “Lots of people like ‘sol-morrow’ and there’s a strong advocacy for ‘nextersol.’” Helen smiles. “But nobody thinks that ‘tosol’ is going to catch on.”

  “Unless you speak English,” Sergei points out, “all those options will sound equally foreign.”

  “MarsNOW could be the opportunity,” Yoshi says, “to correct some language mistakes. We could stop using ‘sunset’ and ‘sunrise,’ and substitute words that indicate the planet’s revolution. It is humans that have phases, not the moon.”

  “You know”—Helen tilts her head—“I’m not sure I ever learned the Japanese for ‘Phobos’ and ‘Deimos.’”

  “‘Fobosu’ and ‘Deimosu.’”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “We could use MarsNOW to get the United States on metric system,” says Sergei. “That would be a big step.”

  “No kidding,” says Helen. “I like that the ‘Astronomy on Mars’ script has us calling our moon by the name Luna. That’s less Earth-centric. We’re not the only ones with a moon.”

  There is a moment when they all try to think of something more to say, and then the moment passes.

  Helen breaks open a chocolate bar. All of them are experiencing a craving for sweet things. They are burning more calories, but Sergei has posited that it might also have something to do with the dust. Everyone takes a square.

  “We have enough for s’mores on the camping trip? It’s a long time in the car,” Sergei jokes.

  Yoshi tells himself that it will be nice to have the Hab to himself for a while. He had been quite a solitary child—his parents were busy and active. He remembers his mother, writing out the family schedule in the morning. Sometimes it was a dilemma: “Where will Yoshihiro be? Yoshi needs somewhere to be.” And there had been the moves: from Japan to Berlin, then London, then back to Japan. His own later peripatetic career as an astronaut. Oh, he was very good at being alone.

  “Did you both see the request for more pictures of each other? Ach. Shoot.” Helen, having licked the chocolate off her finger, has apparently gotten dust on her tongue as well. She makes a gargoyle face, wrinkling her nose and scraping her tongue with her teeth. They are less conscious of maintaining a certain decorum on Mars. Perhaps it is because they are all physically dirtier, perhaps because this is the least physically confined they will be during Eidolon and they are making the most of it.

  “I hope they destroy all these videos and photos,” Sergei says. “Or there will be conspiracy theory. Like the moon landing deniers.”

  “The thing they most liked was the Christmas song.” Helen breaks another piece of chocolate off the bar using a new technique: touching only the wrapping. She hands the piece to Sergei. “I don’t know if we can repeat that. Maybe they should hold on to it, just in case.”

  “True.” Sergei chomps on his chocolate. “But come on. It is Mars. It should be enough. We don’t have to do musical about it.”

  Yoshi watches as Helen breaks a piece of chocolate off for him.

  “I went to Mars,” Yoshi says, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

  “Holy crap, Yoshi,” Sergei says.

  Helen hands Yoshi his chocolate. “I learned that in school,” she says. “Henry David Thoreau. Speaking about Walden Pond, not Mars. But that’s great, Yoshi. Just excellent.” Helen does not sound totally pleased.

  Their screens ping. It is Prime’s last uplink of the sol. These do not include any messages from family and friends, or Earth news, but are generally a confirmation of the latest telemetry. This one includes a video someone at Prime has put together from images and film of week one. They move to the Science/Lab wedge to watch on the largest screen.

  A song plays, and their week of slow, deliberate, meticulous, and technical labor unfolds like a kind of dream ballet. Here are Helen and Yoshi, suiting up for the first EVA. Now, the opening of the hatch. Each of their boot prints in the rusty regolith. Helen and Sergei, making adjustments to the solar array, their movements deft and harmonious. Sergei, in slow motion, removing his helmet in the EVA prep room, and smiling. Yoshi can remember feeling tired at the end of yester-sol as he ate noodles, but had not imagined himself looking so wearily heroic while he did so. Helen bending over and trying to shake the fines from her hair, then straightening up and making a rueful face. She is magnificent.

  The crew plays the video through a second time, entranced by how their experience appears.

  Mars looks so beautiful.

  They look so brave.

  SERGEI

  Man is an explorer, but always he has needed to seek shelter from the environment and predators, and in his caves he found the rest to reflect, tell stories, and make paintings on the walls.

  They are looking for a good cave.

  This is a man’s job. Well, technically it will first be a robot’s job to enter a cave. The thought of introducing a human to subsurface Mars makes the collective Office of Planetary Protection throw up with anxiety, and while a robot from Earth is not a perfectly clean thing, it is judged to be cleaner than a man. Once the robot confirms that there is no life to destroy in the cave, man can follow.

  First, they must get the robot to the cave, and this is a man’s job because a robot is slow and can’t make decisions on the spot. Also it is not a simple thing, to instruct a robot to spelunk with style.

  The Rover drives itself, although one of them must remain in the front of the cab, ready to manually override the automation if necessary. Sergei amuses himself by imagining how Prime is conducting this particular sim. They cannot drive all over the San Rafael Swell, but it feels like the Rover is going the right distance. It is possible that Prime is driving them in circles. He has a very good internal compass. Nothing in his body believes they are driving in a circle.

  Who knows? Sergei sometimes wonders if the muove of the eppur si muove was Prime shipping them to Antarctica. He does not know how Prime is getting it to feel so cold. He is feeling the cold more because various suit malfunctions have caused the heaters in his gloves and boots to fail at different
times, and in those situations his fingers and toes went numb. At first he was proud that Prime was making this extra effort to give him a convincing Mars experience, it spoke to their respect for his skepticism. (Unless it spoke to his vulnerability to irritation.) Anyway, now he has decided to make a conscious effort to accept what is put before him. Both Helen and Yoshi are better pretenders than he is, and he does not want to be left out of the experience. Also, he would like Prime to stop monkeying around with his equipment. These thirty days will be the best part of Eidolon, and they are going too fast. He does not want to be hobbled in any way.

  What walks you could take on Mars. He would like to walk the whole planet. With thirty days you could do almost nothing, but a year and a half would be so good you would not mind getting back inside a little tuna can for nine months. You would not mind so much. This is a flaw in the Eidolon plan. They had shortened the Mars time to only thirty days, and so the feelings that the crew would have about getting into Red Dawn and leaving the planet would be totally different than they would be after a year and a half on the planet. Maybe after a year and a half, they would be ready to return home.

  The Rover is packed with equipment and supplies, they can move around very little and mostly they stay up front, watching the terrain or napping in the back. Lava fields are not the most exciting views, but Helen is a good companion, not too chatty. They are permitted to perform short EVAs when the solar batteries of the Rover are recharging.

  Almost there.

  When lava courses in flows underground, you have the possibility that when it subsides it will leave tubes. This has happened on Earth, and it appears to have happened on Mars. Some of the roofs of these tubes on Mars are meters thick, and many of them are much larger than the ones found on Earth. Caves! For the geologists a lava tube is an excellent opportunity to examine unsullied bedrock kept safe from the shock modifications and dust storms on the surface. It is the kind of environment congenial for chemosynthetic organisms. You might find biosignatures: the handwriting on the wall, the graffito of life. For a man, it is the place for him to get away from solar proton event radiation, and the cold, and all this fucking dust. If man wants to come back to Mars and stay a while, and have nice things, he will need something a little better than his own poop to shield him and his instruments, or bags of Martian regolith on top of a Hab. And it would be good if the place were protected from the dust, because dust is not great for scientific equipment or the mood of the scientist. A lava tube is just smart camping. Why bring heavy payloads of shelter materials all the way to Mars when there are possible underground shelters just waiting for someone to come inside?

  Always, man has desired entrance into a dark hole.

  Dena, Chloe, Wendy, Annie, Abbey, Nikki, Jeanne, and—more recently discovered—Marnie. The names for the skylights around Arsia Mons, the dark holes that lead to something warm and wet and safe. Well, not really any of those things, ha ha.

  It is not lost on Sergei that Prime has prescribed him a daily ingestion of liquorice tea. In women, it seems that liquorice is a natural aphrodisiac, but it has the opposite effect on men. Well, it is all very up front. He does not have to wonder if Prime is slipping potassium bromide into his dumplings; they would tell him if they were. He has noticed that Yoshi is not drinking liquorice tea, so it is to be supposed that RoMeO is not reporting elevated levels of Yoshi’s testosterone. If someone were seen drinking liquorice tea on the space station, everyone else would drink it, whether or not it was prescribed for him. No one wants to be the guy with less testosterone, or fewer morning erections. But Yoshi, if he noticed Sergei’s new regimen, is either not bothered or too honest.

  Soon they will reach their first major site. Then a two-kilometer (real!) walk to Marnie. She is a promising skylight. They will be able to conduct science. Exploration without science is merely adventure. Not that the distinction bothers him.

  Sergei will be happy to get out of the Rover. He wants to walk. Sitting in the Rover and looking at the sims and doing a little work is exhaustively boring. The Rover does not have an exercise machine. Sergei is storing too much internal energy and it is tiring him. It is not a terrible feeling, he is repressed, not depressed. Anything can be borne when you know you have a release waiting. Sol-morrow he will have a good walk. Get things out of his body.

  “The first one is for you; the second one is for me.” That’s how Talia always characterized their having sex after he had been away. She had that division, anyway, that there were sex things for her and ones for him. He could point out that doing things for her also made him feel good, but he doesn’t think she ever believed him. There were good and bad points to her being so practical about sex.

  “If you want to do something with my ass, please just let me know beforehand. A few hours.”

  She was funny that way. He wasn’t sure what happened in those hours. Some sort of preparations, hygienic or otherwise. She was also specific with his technique.

  “It doesn’t do anything if you touch it like that,” she might say.

  It could be exciting, scorn. It gave you something to do.

  “I suppose you want to have sex,” Talia had said in Utah.

  She was not an idiot. He had strawberries in his room. It was her favorite thing, to lie in his lap and have him feed her strawberries. Any kind of food, but Sergei particularly liked the way Talia’s mouth had to work on a strawberry. That was a good example of something that pleased them both, but he’d never told her, as it might have ruined it.

  “Of course I want to,” he said. He had thought about saying “But I respect Alexander.” Actually, he did respect him, liked him. It was a thing to remember, though, that a man could not seduce a woman. You couldn’t be upset with a man, even a friend, if your wife slept with him. Yes, the man could say no, but everyone had a different idea of loyalty. You shouldn’t be upset with your wife either. Only blame yourself in these situations.

  “Come sit with me,” he said to Talia. He had put a pillow in his lap and given her the look.

  Interestingly, his ex-wife had done two new things when they had sex, so these would be things she had learned from Alexander. She made specific requests, and she moved her hips more aggressively. Was more aggressive altogether. In bed, Talia was indolent, but she hadn’t been in Utah. Perhaps she missed him.

  “Did you miss me?” He had been a fool to ask. Such a terrible question, at any time.

  “Not anymore,” she said, which could mean different things, considering the ring on her finger from another man, or the fact that when she said it, he was holding that hand.

  Talia hadn’t stayed all night with him, because of the boys, because of everything. They’d had a laugh, and he thanked her, which made her make a funny face. Such a generous woman.

  “Are you happy?” he asked.

  “If I were mean, I would say no, but because I am a good person, I will say yes.” She was, he thought. Happy. Which was the whole point of the thing. You couldn’t leave sad women behind, not with children. Not if you ever wanted. Well. He didn’t know what that was anymore, when it came to women. Had he ever? It seemed to him that there had been a time of certainty. And when Talia had asked for the divorce, that too had seemed clear, like something he could do, a course of action that would be positive in the end. It was to the end that he had looked. The boys, safe. Talia, happy. Sergei, walking, with only himself to tire or hurt or blame. Granting Talia a divorce had seemed both noble and punishing, which was how he knew it was the right thing to do.

  Before she left him that night in Utah, she did his favorite thing. This was to be stroked. After sex, not before. After, when he was tired and depleted and could take his reward. Sometimes he would turn and stretch like a cat and Talia would scratch his chest or his back or his thighs. Wonderful. Sometimes it was just having her hand move slowly up and down. Not sexual, it could be his arm even.

  The surf
ace of Mars rolls by. There are those that say we should not disturb Mars, not drill, not examine, not gather rocks, not submit it to thermal emission spectography. Too late. There are robots on Mars. There are nuclear reactors on Mars. Worse, Prime will send him.

  YOSHI

  Yoshi is inside something, something that confines him and yet has no distinct boundaries. There is a threat, a malignant presence. He is aware of a great evil, hovering. He realizes that he has been foolish to think that things like demons, or devils, were metaphors. Evil lived, and had a purpose. It was close. It saw him.

  When Yoshi wakes up, he does not know where he is. Never in his conscious life has he so profoundly not known this. The first thing he does is attempt to establish a sequence. Has he just arrived at this place of nowhere, or has he just returned from it and is reliving the memory? This was a question of safety.

  He realizes he has very recently shouted, or grunted. He thinks he can hear the last bit of a shout, in the air. If it is air. Yoshi breathes, experimentally. If he cannot move his lungs then it will be a sign that he is dead.

  He is not dead, unless death includes an illusion of respiration. It is a disadvantage, knowing so little about the rules of death.

  Sergei’s voice, speaking to him, saying his name. Yoshi looks at his screen. He sees Sergei’s face, hears Sergei apologizing for waking Yoshi up.

  “I was dreaming,” says Yoshi, at the same time he realizes the truth of this. He looks at the watch on his wrist. The numbers do not make sense. His eyes, adjusting now, can pick out details. He had fallen asleep in his chair in front of the console in the Science/Lab wedge. He checks the systems of Primitus. There is no cause for alarm. He looks at Sergei’s face on the screen. He does not see Helen.

  Yoshi knows he is not dead, and that Sergei is with Helen in the Rover, returning from the sortie. They check in with each other, every hour.

  But he does not feel safe. Mars. That’s why. Mars. This is a new feeling. He can remember confidence, if not comfort. Why is he now afraid?