by Meg Howrey
Other days he suffers. Sometimes for himself, sometimes for his crew. If it is revealed that they have been to Mars, his crewmates might go crazy. Imagine. To have gone to Mars, and not noticed.
Sergei takes his eyes off the screen and considers their mascot, Tycho. The little man currently embraces a ventilation hose suspended from their ceiling and is wearing a wig made from some of Helen’s hair. They celebrated Helen’s birthday yesterday. Sergei and Yoshi had sung a duet and let her have both their week’s rations of M&M’s.
“I think I’ve missed a few plot points of this movie.” Helen yawns.
“This is the beginning,” he says. “Of thinking that there are things we’ve missed.” He had not meant to say that out loud. He must be more careful. It is a problem that he has to measure some of himself by how Helen and Yoshi react to him, because they are not very reactive people.
But they can all have fun times, they can show themselves to be in good spirits. Fully awake now, Helen and Yoshi join Sergei in calling out in Russian to the actors on the screen, booing, making jokes, until the movie ends.
It is time for bed now. Sergei has arranged his schedule so that he does an additional twenty minutes of light cardio before bed. Prime was worried exercising late in the evening would interrupt his sleep patterns, because they have data to show this can happen, but Sergei is not a lab mouse and, just now, he sleeps better after a little exercise. Helen and Yoshi call it “Sergei walking the dog.”
Helen and Yoshi go to their sleep pods and Sergei moves to the Exercise wedge, loads his screen with Gagarin Cup highlights from March. If he looks upset, or his heart rate jumps up, his jogging on the treadmill and a disastrous season from the Gladiators will provide cover from his Prime watchers.
Exercise is when Sergei allows himself to think, although it would be better for him if he didn’t think at all, and just watched ice hockey. But he knows what he will do. He will run it all through his head, again:
He is walking toward the Hab. He sees the green lights surrounding the Hab, the Hab itself. He sees the cable in his hands, and the regolith under his feet. Rocks and sky. Tracks from the Rovers. And then his screen goes flat green, and then black, and a line of words, flashing too quickly for him to read but—he is almost certain—containing the word FAILURE, and then no sim at all.
Everyone knows what Mars looks like: butterscotch sky and caramel rocks.
But really, no one knows for sure what Mars looks like. It is not so simple, taking a photograph on another planet and then sending this photograph to Earth. Many images collected from Mars take days to assemble, and the differences in light and dust in the atmosphere will be smoothed over for coherence. Some of the cameras use infrared color filters, or ultraviolet, useful for science but not for capturing what the human eye would experience. Still, we can say that we are close to knowing what Mars looks like, and that had been their simulated Mars: Prime’s best guess based on the best guesses available.
What Prime had not been able to give them was a living color palette. Sergei had timed it, how the light shifted every half hour on the half hour, mimicking the gains and losses of their smaller, dimmer sun. The light never moved within the half hour. His shadow on Mars was, for twenty-nine minutes, a dead man. There was also the slightly surreal aspect to your crewmates that the sim created during an EVA, and the knowledge that the tools you were using had been made lighter, that the Rover wasn’t really roving.
It was hard for him to ignore these things, but he’d tried. And he’d gotten quite close. So maybe he felt more like he was in a video game than he was on Mars, but at least he started believing the video game.
When his Mars sim failed, he should have seen Utah.
But he hadn’t seen Utah. He would have known Utah. Utah was seventy-eight million kilometers closer to the sun and the horizon was quite different. Months and months ago, he had walked with his crewmates around the perimeter of the swell location where Primitus sat. He had seen what could be seen. Martian only if one was near-sighted. A good rocky plain, but clearly, in the distance: mountains. A big, bright sun. Blue sky. The sim had needed to obscure all these things, and many more.
Without the sim, he should have seen the mountains. He should have seen a whole team of Prime employees, or at least some yellow tape demarcating their site. Lights. Cameras. Dust makers. It should have looked like a film set in Utah. Like a research facility. Like Earth.
It wasn’t just that—for a few seconds—the sky had been a different color than the sim, and also not at all blue. It was that the sky was so convincingly a real sky that it made the sim seem crude. He wondered that he could have talked himself, however grudgingly, into believing a simulated sky. How could he explain the difference? It was like if you had ever seen a dead body. In the movies or television, sometimes people were confused if a person was dead or not. Not so, in life. You knew when someone was dead. It was not a confusing thing.
It was not an Earth sky, the sky that he saw.
He saw Phobos. It was transiting the sun, an irregular lump of darkness against the pale yellow. Darker than he’d seen the moon, its definition sharper.
When the sim came back on, all the colors, the feeling of the colors, died. Death told you there had once been life.
• • •
IT WAS SOME kind of test. Or a computer glitch. Perhaps Prime didn’t even know it had happened.
It was possible Prime had played similar tricks on Helen and Yoshi, but those two were concealing them. Certainly, they—Helen, Yoshi, himself—had never been absolutely honest about their states of mind, but he’d thought he had an accurate sense of what they were all lying about and why. Not lying. Spinning.
He cannot afford to be suspicious of his crewmembers.
• • •
SERGEI KNOWS THAT paranoia is capable of making him ignore truly inescapable arguments. He knows this, and he tells himself to face these arguments. He instructs himself to defeat himself, but this is like playing against yourself at chess. He is equally good at both sides. Helen or Yoshi might give him a challenge, but he cannot play them without giving himself away to Prime and implicating his crew even further. There are other ways he can test his rightness or wrongness, but, again, he needs to do these tests in such a way that Prime will not know he is doing them. Because if he is wrong, or right, depending on the point of view, then he will ruin everything for everybody. Shame himself, his family, and fuck it up for Helen and Yoshi.
That he hesitates to test his conclusions must mean he knows—some crucial part of him knows—that he was not on Mars, is not in space. Come on.
But he is not crazy.
All the elaborate special effects to no purpose, from the very beginning. It was one thing to simulate Mars, but why simulate the flight to Prime’s launch facility in Texas, the drive to the launch pad, the elevator ride up to a Primitus perched atop the Manus heavy-lift? This was all done for psychological reasons? What real difference would this make in their psychology? None of them had believed it was real.
Why start Eidolon on the same day as the Red Dawn II launch? The synchronicity made no sense except when you realized it was possible to launch Primitus instead of Red Dawn II without many people knowing. Not easy, but possible, especially with a little help from the United States Pentagon. No one who wasn’t Prime was allowed anywhere near the launch pad. Prime had video of launching Red Dawn I and they could have released that to the public. There were space surveillance telescopes and radar trackers all over the world, and these could pick up something the size of a melon at thirty thousand kilometers, but he’d seen stealth hardware that was capable of obfuscating intelligence.
The phrase stealth melon is so stupid he can almost laugh at himself. Except this is a thing that has already been done.
Their isolation was total; every piece of information, including what anything outside their craft truly
looked like, came through Prime. There was very little in the crew’s behavior that indicated they did not believe their mission was real: none of the public videos or messages they sent to Earth included the word Gofer or a phrase like “when we actually go to Mars . . .” Their private letters, yes, but those went to Prime first. And who was to say that this latest email from Dmitri was even from Dmitri? It didn’t sound like him at all. The world could be watching them go to Mars and the astronauts wouldn’t even know it. Prime could be keeping them in the dark because they had a study that showed astronauts perform certain tasks better if they believe they are in a simulation. Diabolical and risky, but not unthinkable. All twisted psychological things are very possible.
Or the world could not know. Sending the crew secretly had better motivations. In fact, there were so many reasons to send a crew secretly he was beginning to approve of Prime doing so. Any failure of MarsNOW—especially something very public and catastrophic—would be an incalculable loss to Prime, and to the wider goal of space exploration. Look at what seemed to be the fallout over the Weilai 3 tragedy. Prime was a business, even more so than the Chinese government. Why not conduct the mission in secret? If it failed, no one would know. If it succeeded, well, they had the whole thing documented. They could even tell the world once Red Dawn landed and—surprise! Three astronauts came out! You would have to deal with another scenario like the moon-landing-denying people, but this would happen anyway because people were crazy.
There was the problem of accounting for their three missing bodies if they died during the mission. Prime would be smart to arrange for faking their deaths in a way that would tarnish neither Prime nor the mission. The options were not pleasant. Prime could arrange for an explosion, say, at something like the quarantine facility in Texas or Utah, and then claim it was the work of terrorists. Terrorists would claim it anyway. But this would be very hard on his sons, this kind of senseless death.
He is being ridiculous.
Sergei forces his attention back to the screen, to react to the game highlights. He only has a few minutes of exercise left, and must capitalize on the opportunity to shout bad language and call people idiots.
Sergei had wanted to play hockey when he was a boy, but had chosen to focus on his studies. His father had said he’d not the right temperament for the sport, anyway. He would not even let Sergei watch, because he said being a fan of a sport you didn’t play made you a follower, and Sergei needed to be a leader. The old man had been a foolish guy; Sergei became a leader but not because of his father’s nonsense, which anyway was not intended to make him a leader. All this “to make you stronger” had always been bullshit, and they’d both known it. What his father wanted was to establish a weakness so that when, inevitably, Sergei became bigger, his father could exploit that weakness and topple the structure. Sergei could be a nice guy and say his father hadn’t quite known what he was doing, but come on. Sergei has sons now of his own. You know.
It’s important to see the truth of things. Okay, he can submit himself to this. People, his sister, but also many people, are always talking about their personal truths, and these are just stories, not so much truth as crutch.
He could be no better. He does not know what particular weakness he has. He thought he had been very careful about not allowing one, but it could be something Prime has done to him in particular, because they had seen it.
Or maybe his father had found him at last, beyond the grave, travelled all the way to Mars to knock his son to his knees.
HELEN
We’ve made up a song,” Helen says. “Would you like to hear it?”
“Should I get the camera?” Yoshi asks. “Or should I pretend that I have not heard you singing this song for the past hour?”
“Are you annoyed?”
“Not at all.”
“We’re cleaning the sleep sacks, the sleep sacks, the sleep sacks, we’re cleaning the sleep sacks so they will be nice!” Helen and Sergei sing.
They are cleaning the sleep sacks, it is true. It is a two-person job: one to hold, the other to brush on the dry shampoo. When they’d pulled Sergei’s sleep sack from his compartment, she’d been relieved to see he’d only affixed to the walls what he’d had up in his wedge on Primitus: a few religious icons of purely sentimental value and pictures of Dmitri and Ilya. Pieces of paper covered in a madman’s tiny script, or crabbed arithmetical glyphs would have been hard to ignore.
They usually listen to music during cleaning day, but neither Sergei nor Yoshi had seemed enthusiastic about making a selection, perhaps since today’s Music in Space! had been a rather long performance involving bagpipes. So they worked accompanied by the ambient noise of Red Dawn, the whirring and humming of their home. This noise was certainly not negligible, but Helen became aware of Sergei’s own silence. As much as possible, she likes to keep Sergei chatting now, because when he is talking she can be more or less certain of what is going on in his brain. She’d started to sing and he had joined in and then they found themselves unable to stop.
Yoshi, she thinks, is a little annoyed. She’d seen him earlier vacuuming in a very aggressive fashion, unlike his usual calm thoroughness. Yoshi likes a clean ship, but it is also his way, Helen thinks, of giving heft and validity to what can be seen and controlled.
Possibly she is exaggerating their vulnerability. Sergei may well be over his lapse of reason, and Yoshi may be perfectly content.
She has her own problem: she is very attractive just now. It’s unfortunate that without hair she should look so beautiful; Helen hopes that she’s the only one who has noticed. She wasn’t selected for this, she’s meant to be the female the other two males will not find alluring. It’s something of an effort to keep her hands off her own head, to not touch her neck, her waist, her thighs, her hips, her breasts, her stomach. Her skin is remarkable: in some places dry and papery like lovely parchment, and in other spots, warmly malleable like sweet dough. At night, in her sleep compartment, she holds parts of herself with a real appreciation.
They are all in extreme close-up; one notices the appearance of a new eyebrow hair. And yet they must communicate as if they are not noticing this. They must protect themselves, from Prime, from one another, from whatever parts of themselves they are grasping in the dark.
On all the Red Dawn screens now: Venus. Their view is shaded: Venus is too bright to look at with the naked eye, but in other ways it has not been enhanced in the ultraviolet-filter way the planet often is. Not, then, a hot mess of toxic chemicals and misshapen volcanoes covered in sulfuric acid clouds, orange and yellow, ugly, a planet gone wrong. No, it looks like what it should truly look like: a cream-colored ball, spinning very slowly in the opposite direction most other planets spin. They have to be disciplined about when they look at it, otherwise they would do nothing but look.
“I have good news,” Yoshi says. “The red pepper is ripe. We can eat it. This week’s winning recipe calls for a red pepper.”
The crew moves to the large console in the Science/Lab wedge.
“It’s a lot of steps.” Helen scans the recipe instructions. “But I guess no one needs Fifty Quick Recipes for Long-Duration Space Travel.”
The recipe says that it will take them three and a half hours to make this dish. Was preparing dinner a meaningful use of three and a half hours? Did knowing that part of this elaborate dinner’s function was to keep you occupied make it more, or less, meaningful?
Yoshi points out a line of the recipe that calls for three fresh bay leaves. “I see another sacrifice is called for. Alas, poor Mildred.”
Yoshi had given the herbs in their garden lab these sorts of names. Mildred. Dorcas. Ermengarde. He hadn’t named the vegetables: the zucchini, spinach, red pepper, pale descendants of the Primitus garden lab.
“Crushed peanuts,” Helen reads. “I can never see how these things are going to come together. I don’t have a good food imagination
.”
Variety and pleasure in food is meant to be a major factor in their psychological health. Prime will challenge chefs on Earth in a competition to make a delicious and nutritious meal from the list of Red Dawn pantry items. The contestants will need to keep in mind that supplies are limited, and while the occupants of Red Dawn will be enjoying artificial gravity, the craft is designed for emergency microgravity conditions: it has no oven, and no stovetop, only a rehydration station and a forced air convection oven. Prime plans on producing a filmed series of professional chefs, cooking schools, and enthusiastic amateurs taking on this challenge. Right now the recipes are coming from, it’s to be assumed, Prime’s own Food Science Lab.
“I once contributed recipes to a cookbook,” Sergei says. “Did I tell you this?”
He has not told them, it is totally new information. (The astronauts have developed a way of letting one another know when an anecdote has been repeated too often. They say: “I love it when you tell that story.”)
“Sergei, was it a cosmonaut cookbook?” Yoshi asks.
“No. It was called The Engineer’s Cookbook. I explained the slow-cooked rib roast.” Sergei shapes a rotisserie motion with his hands. “This is a place where many mistakes are made.”
“I cannot believe I don’t have a copy of that,” Helen says. “I can’t believe every single member of my family didn’t give it to me for Christmas. No one ever knows what to get.”
“Do you think people will understand this is important?” Sergei points with his chin at the recipe on the console. “People might think, ‘Oh, this is not a problem, to always eat the same food. People think, maybe, of prisoners, or soldiers, always eating the same food, food that is not good. Why should we need special variety? Why all these things for our comfort? If you are person who goes crazy after eating the same menu, or from not having fun things to do, then you are not person strong enough to go to space.”
