The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  “How’s work going, by the way?” he asks. He needs to stop talking about the crew, get the focus back on Mireille. It’s unfortunate that the effort not to flirt with her is making him sound like a robot.

  “You mean the spa? I’ve hardly been there.” Mireille leans back in her chair and stretches. “I keep having to get my shifts covered because I’m booking all these games.”

  “That’s fantastic.” Luke wonders if any of the characters Mireille is providing motion capture or voice-over for will end up looking like Mireille in the animation. What would it be like to “play” Mireille in a game?

  “But I cut you off.” Mireille gives him one of her rare, entirely natural smiles. “Third-quarter effect. The thing that happens after the big thing we were waiting for is over and the next big thing is far away.”

  “You got it.”

  “Great. So. Proceed. How can I be of service to the greater Prime good? Let’s kick these quarters to the curb. Give me jargon, or the idiot’s guide version, whatever works. I’ll take notes. Old school–style.” She waves a pen in the air. She is being the Good Astronaut Daughter now. She is clever at this, knows what tone to take, is aware of how she is landing.

  “Keep up the communication with your mom,” Luke says. “This is the time when she needs to hear from you the most, when skipping an email or video would have the greatest impact. You might imagine that your mom won’t be interested in little things, but those little things are going to help give her a sense of connection to you that’s really important right now.”

  “Hold on.” Mireille pretends to be writing. “Let me get all this down. Now, I’m supposed to be super happy and content in all of these messages.” She looks up. “Is that right?”

  “For the messages, honestly, yes.” Luke is pretty sure it’s okay to offer this advice. He’ll need to review it, though. He wants Mireille to be the best possible version of herself so as not to stress out Helen and he’s physically attracted to her and he is combining these things by getting a crush on the version of Mireille that exists only in his head.

  “Maybe it’s helpful to think of the letters as a kind of job, or a volunteer service,” he says. “But what I wanted to say is that it’s natural for you to experience a kind of three-quarter effect of your own. The effort to stay positive and encouraging can make you feel resentful. It’s a long haul, and—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” Mireille says. “I know how to do this. Hey, I got a message from Madoka Tanaka. She’s going to be in LA for work. We’re having lunch. Maybe we can exchange happy family member tips. Thirty Ways to Love Your Astronaut.”

  Luke wishes there was a way to contain Mireille, manage her perfectly, just for the next eight and a half months.

  “I really do understand,” she says, leaning forward into the screen. “We all do.”

  • • •

  AFTER MIREILLE SIGNS OFF Luke swipes the entirety of this conversation from his screen. Manage Mireille? He needs to manage himself.

  His shift starts in thirty minutes.

  Luke had to hand it to Prime. For twenty-four hours after the crew had shut themselves in the Lav there had been a lot of Prime-style shrieking. “Let’s not call this a crisis, but it’s definitely a challenging teaching moment and we should all really use this as an opportunity to get very creative in our solution streaming.” And then, they’d taken it on the chin. “That the crew finds this a necessity is probably the most revealing information we’ve had so far, and let’s be grateful for the challenge in examining that.”

  “Only observe” is Ransom’s new refrain.

  They are not allowed to have theories.

  Ransom also keeps reminding the team that when they Gofer, the crew will have a great deal more privacy and the Obbers will have to get used to working with incomplete data.

  But Prime didn’t want the crew to have more privacy, certainly not now.

  Luke pictures the crew, and all the careful little preparations Prime has made for increasing astronaut enjoyment of life on Red Dawn. New exercise regimens with virtual landscapes. Special meals with complicated and time-consuming recipes. Concerts or events just for the crew uploaded daily. Specialized instruction, more training, more tests. A routine designed to help the crew navigate a daily existence that was both monotonous and restrictive and also bound at every second by an extreme peril which demanded, at the very least, total recall of massive amounts of information, lightning-quick reactions, and pretty much zero margin for error.

  Maybe they should be surprised that the crew had shut themselves in the Lav for only twenty-three minutes. If it was Luke, he might never have come out.

  YOSHI

  This is a tuba concerto by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams,” Yoshi says. “Long Kwan is the soloist, in a live performance with the Hong Kong Baptist University Symphony Orchestra.”

  Prime uploads a music performance every morning. When they Gofer, this will be part of a worldwide music participation program: Music in Space! Right now, someone in Prime is making selections. Yesterday they had a Sufi song. Sufis twirled in ecstasy when they danced, or perhaps the ecstasy of being a Sufi caused them to twirl. There wasn’t much room in Red Dawn for twirling, or for ecstasy either. Helen had bounced around in her chair a little.

  They must all continue to be very normal, very nominal. They are doing, Yoshi thinks, a good job. They are acting as if Sergei had not introduced a note of paranoia. No, it was more an orchestra of paranoia. Helen is doing the best job. Perhaps she is not concerned. Yoshi wants to talk to her, very badly.

  They are in a sort of trap. To ask Helen to join him in the Lav without Sergei for a soundless confabulation would be a clear indication—to Sergei and to Prime—that there is an issue of some significance. Prime already knows—probably—that there is an issue of some significance. They might have deliberately fabricated the issue to test their responses. Double blinds within double blinds were structurally possible.

  There is also a world where Sergei is perfectly fine, and a private discussion is unnecessary.

  Yoshi pretends to listen to the music, but there is not enough tuba in the world to sort this out.

  They have plenty of time now; this exacerbates the problem. Red Dawn is a kind of incubator, and so they must be very cautious about what they allow to grow. You need words—banalities are best—to neutralize the danger. There isn’t enough space for words in Red Dawn either. Not these words.

  They’ve all been trained to recognize the symptoms of paranoia. They are in perfect conditions for its occurrence, more at risk for it than almost anything else.

  At first Yoshi thought it was a prank of some kind. Sergei said, “The odor and bacterial filters need to be repositioned,” and since this was not a sentence that made sense, it seemed that Sergei was pulling them all into the Lav under obvious false pretenses. Yoshi had been a little impatient because it was their first recreation hour since launching from Mars and he wanted to enjoy the views.

  It was difficult to fit all three of them into the Red Dawn Lav, which was even smaller than the Lav on Primitus. It had no shower—sponge baths only for almost nine months—and the three of them crammed together were required to stand nearly nose to nose, with Sergei straddling the commode, Helen jammed against the lockers and cleansing towel dispensers, and Yoshi wedged in between fan separators and Chute nozzles.

  Sergei had brought in a whiteboard and handed out markers. Then he wrote:

  LOST SIM DURING DUST DEVIL ON SOL 23

  TOTAL SIM FAILURE

  SAW REAL LOCATION

  Yoshi’s impulse had been to stop him immediately. It wasn’t that the part of his brain that endlessly reverse engineered Prime special effects had gone quiet. He enjoyed imagining how Prime had managed to accomplish this or that, and assumed they all did. They are engineers; it was their poetry to understand the
se things. But Yoshi was also comfortable with the artificial. Perhaps because of this, he had lost his bearings once or twice, and forgotten the differences between things. The balance was delicate, and needed to be maintained.

  And then Sergei had added the sentence:

  WAS NOT UTAH—WE WERE NOT IN UTAH

  While Sergei continued writing, Yoshi had deliberately avoided looking at Helen. Even a single exchanged glance was too much to risk until they knew exactly what they were dealing with. Yoshi thought about Sergei’s increased conservatism regarding safety protocols during their last sols on Mars, his lack of chatter, the bouts of staring. Helen would have noticed too, though Yoshi was not aware of any countermeasure she had taken. He’d thought that Sergei might be getting a mild case of what they called, in Antarctica, the “bug eye.” Yoshi had felt guilty. He’d been too taken up with his own private ruminations; he should have been more attentive to other people’s subcurrents. And Helen had become too happy. This was why joy was not a particularly desirable emotion on a mission. Joy made you notice less. Or do less with what you did notice.

  As did desire.

  NO LANDMARKS OF UTAH SITE < NO INDICATIONS OF AN OFFICIAL SITE < NO CAMERAS < WE WERE ALONE

  DIFFERENCES IN COLORS < PERSPECTIVES

  NO WARP TO VIEW OF SELF OR HELEN

  PHOBOS IN ANNULAR ECLIPSE

  PHOBOS

  The fluid nature of their leadership roles often made being the commander more titular than anything else, but Yoshi did feel—in the Lav—that this was a situation where he must lead. One good technique was to perform a verbal repetition of something that was said to you, and in this way you could communicate both your desire to understand precisely what was being said, give your crewmate an opportunity to correct or refine his point, and—if necessary—allow him to hear for himself how whatever he just said was ridiculous. Some caution needed to be exercised in employing this method. It was not helpful to be mocking or sarcastic. Yoshi must respond with caution. He also needed to write his response, and since Yoshi was left-handed and prohibited from repositioning himself due to the fan separators between himself and Sergei, he had to scrawl.

  Sergei had been in the Lav for forty-five minutes that morning. Yoshi had assumed diarrhea, but now realized Sergei was probably checking the wedge for cameras. Prime was contractually obligated not to put cameras in the Lav, but Sergei would not have trusted that. He would have checked for audio, but audio was easier to conceal. Sergei’s use of the whiteboard meant he was taking no chances. They would have to come up with some explanation for Prime about this secret, silent meeting. They could brazen it out, but that was a risk.

  Yoshi had taken Sergei through a summary of what Sergei had seen, and then Yoshi erased it and wrote POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS on the whiteboard. Then he’d gotten tangled up in a micro-g-condition urinal funnel that became detached from the wall, so Helen took over.

  WAS NOT TOTAL SIM FAILURE, she’d written. YOUR SCREEN HAD GLITCH. LOADED ALTERNATE MARS SITE.

  Yoshi, having freed himself, tapped her explanation with his marker in agreement and added:

  PRIME DUST DEVIL SIM V. COMPLICATED, NOT SURPRISED AT GLITCH

  And then, after making a fresh bullet point:

  SIM SWITCHING CAUSE OF VISUAL DISORIENTATION, V. NATURAL

  Sergei had written:

  ALSO POSS THAT PRIME WANTS TO MAKE ME BELIEVE > THIS IS TEST > WILL I TELL YOU > BUT I HAVE

  Sergei had not finished the thought. He scrubbed the whiteboard clean and ended the meeting by exiting the Lav. Yoshi had received one look from Helen, which he’d been unable to decipher. He thought his lexicon for Helen’s expressions was complete, but he had been wrong.

  A blip, a glitch, a momentary lapse of reason.

  At some point, for an unspecified amount of time, Sergei thought they’d actually gone to Mars. At the very least, Sergei might now be spending quite a bit of time trying to convince himself that this was not in the realm of absurdity, that he was not insane to entertain the notion.

  It was not helpful—for Sergei—that Prime has them following the mission architecture for what a return after thirty days would really be. They had always planned to train this way, but Sergei could easily fold this into his paranoia.

  Yoshi has accepted the possibility that Sergei wasn’t disoriented, that he’d really seen what he claimed to have seen, but believes that this was something Prime had deliberately done, like the tampering with Sergei’s equipment, like eppur si muove on Primitus. Prime wanted real data. Not astronauts pretending, astronauts believing. Dangerous, this, but understandable.

  Yoshi badly wanted to talk with Helen. Only he was rather afraid that instead of talking about Sergei, something else might come out of his mouth.

  The tuba concerto is over. They must now record their reaction. The astronauts applaud.

  “Thank you very much, Long Kwan and the Hong Kong Baptist University Symphony Orchestra,” says Yoshi, “for that beautiful performance. On behalf of the crew of Red Dawn, I salute your skill and dedication. We were so grateful to be your audience in space today.”

  There is nothing to do but keep going. They have a schedule.

  If Prime had made the voyage out as dynamic as possible, with weeks of calamity or near calamity, their time now is marked by a shift into automated regularity. Were the astronauts capable of setting and maintaining a busy self-guided schedule when there was no immediate cause for them to do anything? Yes, of course they were. Everyone knew that if they were not busy, they would become unhappy and not perform well.

  They might give in to paranoia.

  So they will maintain their Hab and keep their skills sharp by training in sims. They will conduct such scientific experiments as the limited space for equipment allows. They will exercise, maintain their craft, and engage in public discourse and educational outreach concerning their mission.

  “The tuba is a more dynamic instrument than I’ve appreciated,” Yoshi says.

  “I’ve heard that being a professional tuba player is extremely competitive, much more so than other instruments,” Helen says. “In an orchestra, you might have thirty violinists. But there’s only one tuba. And it’s a very loud instrument, and you’re the only one playing it, so it’s very obvious if you make a mistake.”

  “Yes, a mistake would be very obvious,” Sergei says. The words come slowly out of his mouth.

  Yoshi doesn’t look at Helen. He cannot remember how often he gazed at her, before the dust devil moment, or how often he looked at Sergei, before he took them to the Lav and confessed he was delusional. He would have looked them both in the eyes whenever he addressed them, at least some of the time. And there would’ve been just general looking, in the way one did. Yoshi doesn’t want to seem to be looking at either one of them less or more. They will notice. Prime will notice.

  “Time for haircuts!” Yoshi says, and they move from the Galley/Recreation wedge, where they’ve been listening to music, to the Science/Lab wedge. They are not getting haircuts. They are removing five strands of hair from each of their scalps with tweezers. The roots will be analyzed for gene expression change. It is a useful and easy way to look at the effect of cosmic radiation on their bodies, stress levels, and metabolic conditions, particularly good on Red Dawn because it requires no equipment other than tweezers, a storage box the size of a toothbrush holder, a small portion of their single freezer, and RoMeO.

  “But I do need a haircut,” Helen says as Sergei dons medical gloves. Helen is starting many sentences lately with the word but, an indicator that her listeners are joining in late to some sort of internal monologue or debate. It is driving Yoshi mad.

  No, he is quite fine.

  “We all need a haircut.” Sergei’s movements are not erratic, not distracted. He moves with the deliberate pace that all of them practice in Red Dawn, where it is easy to bang an elbow. Th
e walls are a pale silver and this and the curves—especially in their small sleeping pods set above storage spaces—create a slight illusion of more space than actually exists.

  It is true, about the haircuts, at least in his case. Sergei’s wheat-blond hair grows downward, into a neat cap, but Yoshi’s hair goes vertical until the weight brings it down, and the vertical stage is a little too comical. The situation on Red Dawn is already teetering toward farce.

  “I should have shaved my head when you two did,” Helen says.

  Sergei removes five strands of Helen’s hair at the roots, performs the same service for Yoshi, then hands Yoshi the tweezers. For a paranoiac, Sergei seems perfectly content to offer up his nucleic acids. Yoshi must not exclude the possibility that Yoshi is the one suffering from paranoia, or that he has fed from Sergei’s. Whatever happens to one astronaut can easily happen to the rest. They are at risk for contamination—paranoia is psychologically communicable—and Red Dawn is too small to dedicate any location for crew isolation.

  “I want to shave my head,” Helen says.

  “Chuhh,” says Sergei. “Okay.”

  “I’m serious,” Helen says. “That’s the kind of haircut I am requesting. It will be so much easier. I don’t want to dry shampoo for seven months. It’s silly that I didn’t do it before.”

  Helen wants to shave her head? Where in Helen was this desire located, what was its source, what did she see when she saw herself bereft of hair?

  “Okay,” Sergei says. “Will be best if we cut short, and then use the vacuum shaver.”

  “When would you like to put it on the schedule?” Yoshi asks, because he must not betray any consternation. Yoshi has a vision of the kind of Victorian lockets containing the hair of the beloved. He had thought of asking Madoka once if she would contribute a lock to a locket, for him to take with him to space. She would have done it. What had stopped him? Perhaps knowing that things like lockets with hair in them were very fine in literature but should not be attempted in real life, lest they fail to live up to literature.