by Meg Howrey
“We could do it now,” Helen says. “And move the Venus Probe Sims back a half hour? It shouldn’t take long. Just hack and buzz!”
“Changing the schedule on the fly is Prime recommended,” Yoshi says. It is true. They must not become too dependent on routine—it puts them at risk for torpidity, which rather seems the least of their worries at this point.
“How do we classify Helen’s hair for disposal?” Sergei folds his arms and looks at Yoshi. “This is much more hair than what comes off our heads. It is nonrecoverable cargo, yes, but of what label? Nonbiodegradable waste? It is possible that it was contaminated on Mars and we should mark it for destruction.”
He is making a joke, although trash is an incredibly serious topic on Red Dawn. On the space station they can use a Prime Raptor for trash, which is jettisoned prior to reentry and disintegrates, along with its contents, when it hits Earth’s atmosphere. But they will be returning to Earth with all their waste materials.
“Perhaps we can keep it in the Lab,” Helen says, with a smile. “Maybe some hair product company would like to give us a million dollars to do a study on the effect of UV radiation on labile proteins? I can’t think of another use for it. I don’t think my hair is going to be of much value against solar flare.”
“It could make nice pillow,” Sergei says.
“Or a sweater. I forgot to pack my knitting needles, though.”
“Can you use my chopsticks?” Yoshi joins in the joking just in the nick of time.
They do haircuts in the Lav. Sergei volunteers to play barber and Yoshi remains in the doorway to video the event and in order to give Sergei more room. Also, because he is horrified. Helen faces the wall and straddles the closed lid of the commode. She pulls off the hair band holding her ponytail together and fluffs out her brown and gray curls. They look so soft.
“My father would cut our hair when we were children.” Sergei hands Helen a trash bag to hold. “My sisters and me. We had to make a line and take turns in a chair in the kitchen. I remember he would put a bib around our necks, to catch the hair. Very scratchy yellow plastic, I hated this. But I learned how to cut hair from watching him cut Galina’s and Valechka’s, and I cut my own boys’ hair.”
“You don’t have to make this nice,” Helen points out. “Since we’ll just be shaving the rest off.”
“Maybe you will like just short hair, not bald,” Sergei says. “Bald is extreme. And you might have egg-shaped head. You must consider what Yoshi and I will have to look at.”
Yoshi has no words. Sergei is patting Helen’s head, separating clumps of curls. He asks for and receives a comb. And Helen’s eyes keep closing whenever Sergei tugs the hair back from her scalp. For nearly eight months Yoshi had nothing in his lexicon for Helen’s sensuality, and now he has the way she touched her bare skin on Mars, and this, this giving over to someone else’s, not his, touch.
Problems, these are all problems. They were all behaving differently. They could not pretend that they weren’t, or Prime would be curious about what they were concealing. They must find a way to be transparent and opaque.
Maybe this was what Helen was doing. She never looked at herself, but Prime was looking all the time. She would give them something to look at so she could retreat deeper into whatever had happened to her. (What had happened to her?) She would empower Sergei as her Delilah.
He’d not experienced the dust devil in the way that Helen and Sergei had. Had Prime deliberately kept him out of it? Had Prime manufactured a scenario in which Yoshi would see Helen nearly naked? Why is he the commander now; what specific skill does he have for any of these scenarios? This was Junya with his hand pressed over Yoshi’s eyes all over again. Yoshi can only command himself, to wait, to endure.
He must not forget himself, or let his crew forget themselves. There is too much time, too much space. They must remember their names, their countries, their languages, their sexes, their bodies. They must remember where they are, where they came from, where they are going. He can feel the pull, the allure, of forgetting. It is the pull of space itself and they are explorers and they will always go to the edge of the map. But he cannot yet, he is not ready yet, he has only just begun to open his eyes.
He knows he must think of his wife. Only, somewhere on Mars, he lost the power to imagine her.
MADOKA
The hug had been awkward, both of them guessing wrong about the other’s intentions as to where cheeks and shoulders and hands were headed, and with Mireille getting her ring caught in Madoka’s scarf. Madoka had remembered the girl differently, as someone larger, but Madoka is the taller of the two.
The girl usually signed her Prime Family Member posts with the name Meeps, but Madoka is proud of her good French and prefers the name Mireille.
Madoka does not want to be friends with Mireille, whom she judged in Utah as being a vaguely dangerous person, but decided it would look odd, certainly unsociable, not to suggest a friendly get-together while she was in Los Angeles. Her Prime family liaison knew her schedule, and Madoka imagined the family liaisons having coffee together, discussing their charges, figuring out how best to handle them. Prime would be pleased to think of the two of them having lunch, creating an empathy bridge or however they put it. Yoshi’d been pleased too, when she’d told him. “From what Helen says of her daughter, I think you’ll find her amusing,” is what he said in his last message.
Madoka had formed an opinion of Helen Kane during the launch experience: incredibly capable and accomplished, unfeminine, respectful, quick, self-contained but professionally kind, and what Yoshi would call “jovial.” She’d not seen the need to add greatly to this idea in the past nine months, since everything Yoshi said about Helen fit into one or two of those categories. She had liked that Helen had made Yoshi a pair of slippers for his birthday. It seemed motherly.
The restaurant had been suggested by Mireille. They are sitting in a garden patio decorated in old-fashioned European-style antiques, not Madoka’s taste at all but pretty in its way. She’s in her travel-work uniform: dark and tailored, with a patterned scarf for style and friendliness. It is always her PEPPER that is the star of the show, but as PEPPER’s ambassador Madoka must not look too robotic herself. The other patrons of the restaurant are both more casually and more elaborately outfitted. T-shirts and mounds of hair and breasts, expensive but no style. Mireille is wearing a silk dress that doesn’t quite fit her: she has pinned the neckline to a more modest décolletage.
Madoka had settled with herself that she would treat Helen’s daughter the way she might treat a Prime employee. She would be friendly and not say too much, ask questions, praise when appropriate. She hadn’t been able to think up a more interesting persona: she’d already used up the secretly insane woman character at the launch.
The problem is that so far, Meeps seemed to have selected the same persona for herself. After the initial entanglement with the scarf, they had settled in to their table, ordered slightly different kinds of salads, and were now engaged in an almost competitive exchange of blandness. They have talked a little about Los Angeles, about Japan, about the latest photos and crew news, about how sad the Weilai 3 tragedy had been, about a space movie neither of them had seen but was supposed to be very entertaining. Madoka feels that while both of them are performing their chosen roles perfectly, neither one of them is particularly happy about it.
“Tell me about your work,” Mireille is saying now. “You mentioned you’re bringing a robotic caregiver—is that the right label?—to a private client?”
“It’s for the client’s mother,” Madoka says. “PEPPER can act as a nursing assistant, but in this case it will be more of a companion.”
“PEPPER?”
“The name of the model.”
“What does she look like? PEPPER, I mean, not the client’s mother.”
Madoka retrieves her screen and brings up a picture of
PEPPER. As she does this, she is aware of Mireille watching her carefully, almost as if she’s studying her. There is something greedy in the girl’s attention, or critical.
“Oh, wow.” Mireille smile-frowns at the image of PEPPER. “It looks so much like a robot. I mean, like, when someone says the word ‘robot’ this is what you would think of. Classic robot.”
They are both bent a little forward, looking at the picture of the robot. “She seems nice,” Mireille says. “Does ‘PEPPER’ mean anything? I mean, beyond the English word.”
“No. It’s just the word in English. It’s not easy to come up with a good name for a robot. It has to work for either male or female, because the voice can be set to either.”
“Do more people make her sound female or male?”
“It depends. On who is doing the choosing, on the care recipient, on what primary tasks the PEPPER is assigned to.”
“She’s wearing a skirt.”
“We call it a silhouette,” Madoka says. The subject is certainly a safe one; she can talk about the robot for hours, but she’s not certain Mireille will understand, she might think it all bizarre and inhuman. Americans have funny thoughts about Japanese culture: robots and filthy pornography and obedience and paper crafts. Madoka cannot allow PEPPER to become silly or strange. Right now, she’s all she has.
“I’m trying to picture my grandmother with a robot like that,” Mireille says. “She’s in assisted living. In New York, where my aunt and uncle live. Do you have that in Japan?”
“Assisted living? We do, yes. It is very expensive, though.”
“I don’t know why, I just assumed that seniors in Japan would be looked after by their families, at home. That it was mostly just here in America that we pack them away.”
“Oh, you’ve been told that we have great respect for the elderly in Japan,” Madoka says. “We do, but that doesn’t mean we wish to live with them.”
Mireille starts to laugh, then stops and looks demurely down at her plate and changes the laugh to a polite smile.
Is she imitating me? Madoka wonders. Or imitating what she thinks a nice Japanese business-lady wife of astronaut would be like?
Madoka remembers female friendships in her past. Rolling with laughter on Yuko’s bed, talking, talking, talking. What had she ever had so much to talk about? Emi rushing to Madoka’s dorm room at Harvard and throwing herself in Madoka’s arms because Emi’s mother had died. Madoka’d been the one Emi had turned to at such an important moment, imagine that.
When Madoka puts her screen back in the bag at her feet she sees, under the table, that Mireille is sitting on her hands. She is not imitating Madoka. She’s nervous. Madoka is ashamed. And suddenly, exhausted. It’s not only the travel. It’s this waiting. Always waiting. For what? She tries to think of something kind to say to Mireille.
“I like your dress,” she says. “It’s very pretty.”
“I had an audition.” Mireille releases one hand and fiddles with her doctored neckline. “For a play. This morning. I had to cry, in the scene.”
“That must be difficult.”
“No. Not for me.” Mireille half laughs.
“How do you do it?” Madoka is genuinely interested. It would be something, to know how to make yourself cry.
“In drama school they teach you not to use anything very close to you for things like that. Or something really painful you haven’t dealt with. I have a trick. I think of this thing my mom told me once. My mom’s dad had this awful accident, when my mom was a kid, and he was in a vegetative state for years, before he died. She grew up visiting him once a week. My mom said that on his birthday they would bring a cake to where he was, at this facility, and sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ Whenever I have to cry, I mean professionally, I imagine that.” Mireille flutters a hand in front of her face, perhaps to ward off an onslaught of tears right now.
Madoka sees it: children surrounding a man in a hospital bed, singing to an inert body. It is very terrible. It is as awful and blindly important, in its way, as her great-great-grandmother dying with her feet stuck in melting tar.
Sometimes Madoka is able to grasp what Yoshi talks about, this incredible thing they are—they will be—doing. Human presence on another planet, a monumental breakthrough for the species, for the history of human life. And other times, like now, this huge thing breaks down to the tiniest of particles, the brume of Martian dust, as Yoshi has described it. Why should a woman bound by her own feet to her planet and suffocating, or a man caught between worlds while his children sang “Happy Birthday” to him, why should these things not stop us all, in awe, in terror?
“That probably sounds horrible,” Mireille says. “I mean, my using it. Like I’m cashing in on an emotion that isn’t mine.”
Madoka thinks. It doesn’t sound horrible to her, but possibly she’s not the right person to judge this.
“How is the emotion not yours?” she asks. “If it makes you sad?”
They both contemplate this question in silence for a moment.
“It’s hard to know what’s really yours,” Mireille says. “Sometimes I think I should go on one of those pilgrimage-type things. Like walking across a continent or, at least, a really long trail. Confront my true nature.”
“I suspect we all have the same nature when we are cold and hungry and tired,” Madoka says. “Also, to overcome an adversity you have manufactured for yourself is a bit silly.” She stops, because it occurs to her that this is maybe a very rude thing to say, but Mireille does not look offended. She looks relieved. It strikes Madoka that she could be friends with this person with the ghoulish imagination and hopeful dress. They would have to be friends in a way Madoka has not tried before, though, since the other ways always ended.
“One of the things, working with robots,” Madoka says, “is that you see what is unique about human nature. You don’t realize how creative you are. That is your true nature.”
“I guess it doesn’t seem so impressive,” Mireille says. “If that’s everyone’s true nature. All humans, I mean.”
Madoka tries to think of a good example of human nature, for both of them. Because she doesn’t feel that great about herself either.
“You love your mother.” Madoka had not quite made it into a question, to be safe.
“Yes,” says Mireille. “It’s not that simple, but yes.”
“You see,” Madoka says, “that is something a robot can’t do. A robot can’t say yes in the way you just said it. You could ask one of my PEPPERs if it loved, and it could run a computation, as you did, and decide to answer yes based on certain evaluations, as you did. But it would just be yes, in the end. It wouldn’t be a sad yes.”
“That’s not such a great thing,” Mireille says. “When you think about it.”
“Nonsense.” Madoka says it gently. “‘I love you’ is just ‘I love you.’ It’s imitation. A sad ‘I love you’ is art.”
SERGEI
Helen leans forward and opens her eyes.
“Interesting film,” she says.
“You were sleeping,” Sergei points out.
“I was following along with my eyes closed.”
“Helen. It is a silent movie.”
“Catch me up?”
“Engineer Los and his team received a mysterious communication from space. Then there was Soviet propaganda and romantic drama. Costumes are very funny. Soviets go to Mars in sweaters. Everyone on Mars wears crazy metal outfits and actors trip on them.”
Helen scoots herself up into a more attentive position. For film nights, they convert their dining area into a recreational venue, moving the table and bringing in the portable screen from the Science/Lab. The table chairs are lowered and the footrests extended, though the design of the chair/loungers has not been a complete success. Two of the thermals no longer work; the material is not easy to clean. Helen’s chair
/lounger has a stain from when Sergei dropped the sour cream during Cosmonautics Day celebrations.
Sergei turns his eyes back to the screen. The film was made in 1924, one of the first science-fiction movies, though more political message wrapped in science fiction. Sergei doesn’t care about these old politics, and the Mars imagined here is preposterous. Still, it is a nice change and there is a good tradition of watching really bad space movies. The films Prime recommends for them now are all people overcoming odds, triumph-of-the-will-type things, meant to inspire. Sergei knows that he needs to have a triumph of will, but he can’t tell what direction this effort should go in. He would prefer to watch something like a comedy where everyone is doing the wrong thing in funny ways. But he will watch anything. He doesn’t like to be alone with his thoughts now. He needs a movie, or someone talking. He needs to fall asleep in “the saddle,” as the expression goes, to avoid that terrible moment when the responsibility for his thoughts is clearly his and his alone.
Sergei’s loneliness is total, unbridgeable. Things—talk, information, jokes—do not keep him company but they do prod him forward. He cannot read, unless it is work. He falls out of sentences after a paragraph, even if it’s the kind of book deliberately meant to be sheer entertainment.
“It’s not very good,” Sergei gestures at the screen. “It’s no White Sun of the Desert.”
“Ha ha,” says Helen. Yoshi stirs. He has not been fully asleep.
“There are robot slaves on Mars?” Yoshi blinks at the screen.
“By decree of the Elders,” Sergei explains. “One third of the planet’s life force is stored in refrigerators. The rest are slaves.”
“It’s fun to watch some of these obscure things,” Helen says.
Helen must still be parceling out things like this, “saving” movies and books and ideas and feelings, in anticipation of doing it all again. There are days when this seems right to him too, and those days are easiest.
