by Meg Howrey
“Okay, Helen,” says GAIA. “I will prepare the rye trays.”
“GAIA, what are you doing?”
“Helen, I am preparing the carrot trays. Would you like me to work on another task?”
“GAIA, cancel preparing the carrot trays. Proceed with the rye trays.”
“Helen, I am canceling preparing the carrot trays. I am proceeding with the rye trays.”
“GAIA, that is correct.”
Helen moves out of the greenhouse attachment and through the inflatable tunnel back to the EVA prep room of Primitus.
Was it too late? It wasn’t good for Meeps to have a father she loved more with every absent year, and a mother whose past absence was an ongoing source of blame. Did Meeps need her to stay now? Would giving up Mars for Meeps make her daughter understand that she was loved?
Did the fact that she did not want to give up Mars for her daughter mean that she didn’t love her daughter?
Maybe Eric had made her into the thing he thought she was, or maybe he had been right all along, and there was nothing more to her, and a great deal less, than she had always supposed.
Yoshi is ready to come in. Helen is ready to come out. They make the transfer smoothly, and Helen joins Sergei, waiting just outside the hatch. They move to the Solar Array One. Helen feels better being outside, with the sweep of the valley before her and a task that requires larger movements. She does not think about Meeps, or Eric.
They are a quarter of the way through clearing SA2 when a weather alert comes through. Two dust devils, south of the landing site, but on the move. Helen scans the telemetry being loaded onto her screen.
A devil on Mars is more dramatic visually than the ones on Earth: higher and wider but, in the negligible atmosphere here, much less destructive. To humans. Potentially not great for machinery, though it will finish cleaning the solar panels for them.
This simulated storm is probably a test of crew choreography and communication. And her own assessment of what protocol to follow. She sends a message to Mission Control, then switches to crew-link.
“Everybody see the weather report?”
“Confirm weather report.” Sergei is about sixty feet away.
“Yoshi, you there?”
“Here, Helen. I have them. Two dust devils.”
“Okey-doke, let’s use this as an opportunity to test our timing. Yoshi, turn on the porch lights for us, please. Sergei? Let’s give these guide cables a try and get back to the Hab. Yoshi, I’d like to know how smoothly we can prep everything for storm. I will take care of GAIA.”
“Green lights on,” says Yoshi. “I’m sealing off the greenhouse.”
“GAIA, I want you to go to the locker and power down.”
“Okay, Commander.”
GAIA’s locker is a kind of upright coffin, stir-welded to seamlessness to prevent dust contamination, and stocked with extra seeds. The round shape of the greenhouse should have no problem weathering a dust devil, which might last no more than fifteen minutes, and even withstand a more serious storm, though the plants will die. Even after they leave, if Mars huffs and puffs and blows the greenhouse down, GAIA should be able to survive inside the locker, and be able to repair or rebuild her home. It’s a good sequence to practice, getting her in and out of her coffin.
“Proceeding now to Hab. Sergei?”
“Let’s jam, Helen.”
“Right behind you. My guide cable is stuck. Hold on.”
“There is—” Sergei’s voice disappears under a fuzz of loud static. She can see him, just ahead. And then she can’t. A wall of color rises up between them, accompanied by some kind of ground force. Helen thinks of land mines, of geysers. She is not knocked off her feet, but she loses her equilibrium, staggers. Her faceplate is moving, no, playing a sort of high-speed kaleidoscope: brown, gray, blue, red, orange, pink. The static is loud in her ear. Everything slows. The static is terrific, confusing.
Sergei’s voice crackles back on the line.
“That’s not right,” he is saying, in Russian. The static erupts again, and the colors darken to a slate gray, then almost black.
She is standing. She is still standing. She is holding on to the cable, or rather, holding it down. Is she exerting pressure? It feels pinned to her glove.
It is possible, Helen thinks, that she is being electrocuted. She imagines the outline of her skeleton, like a cartoon. The pressure in her jaw and her lower back, the muscles of her right arm, the static in her ear—these sensations are suspended, not increasing or decreasing, coming or going.
She cannot feel the ground. She is not on the ground, but also not quite in the air, or maybe both these things, Earthly and suspended.
This might, then, be death, or it might be the space inhabited just before death, on the edge of the map, right before you fell off of life. Helen thinks, Dad?
It is a thing people tell you: that the dead are waiting for you in some nice place, heaven, usually, but maybe Mars, maybe a simulation in Utah.
And then, Helen thinks: No.
No, he’s not here. He’s not anywhere. He is dead. He is gone. For so long he had been alive and dead at the same time. Maybe, so had she. Maybe that’s why she thought “Dad?” She might as well have asked, “Helen?”
She is, like Michael Collins circling the moon, the most alone person in the history of people. She has always been the most alone person, it hasn’t needed going up or in any direction.
How does it feel?
It feels spectacular.
Helen can hear her own heartbeat, curiously not fast, but quite steady. This gives her a sense of power. There is a storm happening and she is inside it, either in a death way or a simulated way. It’s up to her to take control of the thing. Helen imagines that the storm—the devil—is not acting upon her but coming from her.
The veil of darkness is whisked off her face. Helen can see Sergei, kneeling, and the green lights of the east hatch. The heavy buzz of static separates into words. It is Yoshi, then Sergei. Sergei is fine, is getting to his feet. They can see a cloud of dust moving north, forming a loose conical shape, dissipating. She is still holding on to the guide cable. The diagnostics of her suit are nominal, and so is she. Helen turns back to Primitus and the greenhouse. They appear startling white against tawny regolith. The sky is paler, very beautiful, almost pearly. She can see the dark irregular shadow of Phobos overhead, more clearly than she’s ever seen it.
“I’m okay,” she says.
Sergei says he is okay.
Yoshi says it looked on camera four like a dust devil erupted right underneath Helen’s feet.
Normally they dock their spacesuits to the exterior of Primitus, but Helen would like to run some additional tests on their communications systems, so they use the eastern hatch to enter the Hab. Sergei is first out of his suit. His face is blank and white, as if he too has been bleached by the devil. He repeats that he is fine. He had not been knocked over, he says. He had knelt down on top of the guide cable when he felt it lurching out of his hands. “That was weird!” Helen says, which is a slight betrayal of what it was, but doesn’t feel bad to say. Sergei agrees that it was weird. “Very good sim.” Perhaps a little unrealistic, but good practice. He will get up to the Hab now, and see what images their remote cameras have captured of the event.
The exterior of her spacesuit is heavily crusted. Helen clambers out of it, and manages to displace a good deal of dust onto her compression jumpsuit. She grabs a hose to deal with it, but wrenches the nozzle too strongly and a section of the tube detaches, shooting a cloud of fines all over her, a second dust devil. Helen drops the hose and spreads her arms, gazing down at the mess she has made. “Look at me,” she says, with unexpected love.
YOSHI
Yoshi joins Helen in the EVA prep room as Helen is attempting to suction up fines from both the floor and her person.
>
“No, it’s too much,” Helen says, laughing, as she looks down at her filthy jumpsuit. “I can feel Mars everywhere. I am not spending my last week here in a dust bag. Let me get out of this thing.”
Helen unzips her compression suit. He’s never seen her do this; her method is different from his. She does not peel, allowing the fabric to roll inside out, but shrugs the fabric down off one shoulder, inches it down her arm, then grasps the cuff and pulls the sleeve out straight. After repeating this technique with the other arm, she hooks her thumbs into the torso of the suit and shimmies it down to her hips, then joggles the legs down until she can step out. Yoshi can see the sense of this technique. The appendages of the suit are cut so narrowly that turning them outside in takes quite a time. He realizes that he is staring.
“Yoshi, will you grab me one of the spares? Before I get dressed, I’m taking the ten seconds of shower I am allotted.” Yoshi turns to a supply locker.
“Woosh,” says Helen. He hears the sound of skin on skin. “That’s always such a relief. This is crazy.” When he turns around with the spare jumpsuit, she is rubbing her legs, sending out more little puffs of dust. “I’m electric! Every speck of Mars flies off my suit and onto my skin. Why am I always ten times dirtier than you or Sergei?” She picks up a vacuum nozzle. “Let’s try to get as much off me as we can.”
Helen is now wearing only her Solox bra and underpants. Yoshi has seen Helen in shorts and a T-shirt. He has seen discrete portions of her bare flesh when they practiced medical procedures. This is the most he has seen of Helen all at once and they are very close together. In the athletic locker room in Utah, Yoshi and Sergei had conversed comfortably while naked. Naturally, Helen had not been present during those times. Yoshi thinks that his brain has not accurately recorded her physique; he does not know it. Her thighs are red where she has rubbed them. She hands a vacuum tube to Yoshi and turns one on herself. He doesn’t quite know where to aim his, so points it at her feet.
“I’m jealous,” Yoshi says. “I didn’t get to experience the sim.” Something has happened to both his crewmates. Sergei had come back unnaturally blank of expression, and Helen is the reverse: elated, lit up. Her voice is different, lighter. Something other than clothes has been removed from her body.
“It was very quick. I would have been okay with it going on for much longer, to take it all in. I’ll admit it, for a second I thought I’d been electrocuted.” Helen takes a deep breath. “Wow. Really, the oddest sensation. Maybe I just became a superhero.”
The exposure of so much of Helen’s body, so much of her everything, makes Yoshi feel similarly naked.
She turns around and says, over her shoulder, “Can you do my back? These fines are very determined. Just don’t leave the nozzle on my skin too long or it will be hard to pull it off. Try a kind of scooping motion.”
Yoshi begins methodically suctioning Helen’s back. “Wait. Here,” she says, turning. “Wait, do here.” She laughs. “Oh, that was a good one. It’s kind of horrible in a great way. Get this section. Ow. Great.” Now they are both laughing. Helen thrusts out an elbow, a hip, holds up a knee. “Zap it. Get that! Wait. I have middle-aged-woman stuff here.” It is true. Helen is trim, but there is an unexpected soft fold of flesh just around her waist. She pulls the fold up. “It’s my Tharsis bulge! We’re getting very real here on Mars right now, and that’s just how it’s going to be.”
Helen is looking at him now and he is looking at her. She is allowing him, he sees, to truly look at her. Which either means she hasn’t allowed it before, or he never tried.
What a large thing it is to be Helen, what infinite space she is. And then to be seen by her. As if, just for once, the universe understood him, came up with a name for him, instead of the other way around.
“Okay, that’s pretty good, I think,” Helen says. “My feet are freezing.”
Helen has been obscuring large parts of herself. Helen must get dressed, must clothe not just her body but all of that vastness. He cannot travel for eight months with all of that, there is no room. She must pack herself back inside herself.
Yoshi realizes that he had wanted—still wants—to touch Helen. Not in the way he wants to touch his wife. Not to give pleasure, or receive it. He’d wanted—he wants—to feel that infinite space, to know what happens there.
LUKE
The big thing coming up is providing the crew with enough activity,” Luke says. “Meaningful occupations. Varied tasks. Challenges. The return trip is not going to be comfortable.”
“Right,” Mireille says. “The Venus fry-by.”
When the crew is on the planet for a year and a half, they will be able to return to Earth essentially the way they came, as Mars and Earth once again draw close. After only thirty days, however, Earth and Mars are hurtling away from each other, and enormous amounts of fuel would be needed to make up the distance. Orbital mechanics dictated a different route home after thirty days, with Red Dawn using Venus as a gravity assist, giving the craft an extra push.
“In all likelihood we won’t have to use the Venus fly-by return,” Luke says. “It’s only if we have to cut the mission short. But it made sense to incorporate it into Eidolon so the crew would have a chance to run it fully. And, you know, it fits with the Mars portion only being thirty days. It’s more realistic for the crew. Anyway, even if this happens for real, they will be exposed to a little more radiation, yes, but ‘fry-by’ is a little harsh. Red Dawn is up to the challenge.”
“Is that a Star Trek pillowcase?” Mireille leans forward into her own screen, squinting.
After they’d spoken on the day of the Weilai 3 tragedy, Mireille messaged to apologize for how she’d acted (“The bread knife thing was pretty dumb, thanks for being nice about it”) and then a third time because she wanted his opinion about a new kind of psychoactive medication. He’s not meant to be speaking with her at all, but apparently getting the family members to open up about their experience has proved difficult, and as long as Luke records any “sessions” he has with Mireille, Ransom and Kyrah, the Kane family liaison, have okayed the communication, with strict guidelines.
“Of course it’s a Star Trek pillowcase.” Luke smiles and whips the pillow out from behind his back, holds it up. His pod chair would seem a more classically appropriate and professional piece of furniture to conduct a session from, but there is no way to position his screen from the chair that would not include displaying his bed in the background, and that seemed unprofessional. So he is sitting on his bed, and Mireille can only see the wall and part of the window. He had forgotten about the pillowcase. At some point in the conversation he must have pulled it up behind him for comfort. “It was a gift from my Secret Winter Solstice Fairy,” Luke says. “But it’s a way better quality fabric than my own. I wish I had the whole Star Trek sheet set, to be honest.”
“Right. So I’m guessing you don’t do a whole lot of home entertaining. Or perhaps Star Trek bed linen is the Prime equivalent of black satin sheets.” Mireille gives him one of her professional-grade looks, straight out of an old black-and-white movie, one eyebrow raised, lips slightly pursed. He can’t tell if she’s being provocative or making fun of someone who is trying to be provocative. Either way, he’s provoked. He needs to be very careful. Mireille really does need someone to talk to, but it would be better if she talked to Kyrah, who presumably does not have thoughts about the shape of Mireille’s mouth.
“It’s the Prime equivalent of white cotton.” He can delete this section, later, from the transcript running on the side of his screen, and from the recording itself. Luke can also, if he chooses, erase the entire thing and claim that the software on his personal screen failed to record the session. There is so much going on with the crew right now, Ransom wouldn’t notice.
They have lost audio feed into the Lav of Red Dawn. They never had video in there, and the audio got knocked out sometime between the last inspectio
n before launch from Mars, when it was operational, and two days ago, when it went silent.
Two days ago Sergei asked Yoshi and Helen for assistance in the Lav and the crew had all squeezed themselves in there and stayed in there, all three of them, for twenty-three minutes.
It was possibly Sergei who had knocked the audio out, and the why of that might be connected to the fact that Sergei’s vitals during the launch of Red Dawn from Mars had been nothing like his vitals during the launch of Primitus. And now all three of the astronauts were spiking in new ways.
Something, in short, was up.
“So, anyway, we’re approaching the part of the mission when the crew is at risk for what we call ‘third-quarter effect.’” Luke puts the pillow behind his back. “It’s the period of time when—traditionally—a kind of lethargy or apathy sets in. The greatest event is in the past, and the next thing to look forward to feels pretty distant. It doesn’t have to do with number of days so much as perception of time. We’d like to try to avoid the three-quarter effect as much as we can.”
“I love when people come up with these special psychological terms and descriptions for ordinary life things.” Mireille talks with her hands, air-sculpting her sentences, giving them geography. “The other day, one of my clients asked if I could turn up the heat on the electric blanket because he had ‘temperature sensitivity.’ I was like, ‘You’re cold. You don’t have some kind of special condition.’ I didn’t say that, of course.” Mireille sweeps her hair from one side to the other. It’s several shades lighter than her mother’s and falls in waves, as opposed to Helen’s frizzy curls. “I know it’s hard to imagine, but when I’m at work I have this whole nurturing vibe. I talk like this—” She can change her entire physiognomy in an instant. “Oh of course, Mr. Smith, let me adjust that for you.”
He can see more of Mireille’s kitchen now. It’s crowded with things: a blue shelf with a collection of antique cups and tins, pictures he can’t quite make out taped to the refrigerator, a birdcage populated by tiny fabric birds.
