The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  I had the thought yesterday that love from a parent toward a child—no, my love for you—was the most terrible form of love, because it can’t ever be reciprocated.

  I have considered it a point of pride, a skill, that I’ve been able to extricate myself from the tragedy that happened to my family, that I didn’t let it define me. It feels really good to do that, Meeps. It feels really good to be free. In the greatest and happiest moments of my life I haven’t thought of anyone, not even, no, especially, myself.

  And yet, if anyone were to ask me right now to think of someone I love, I would think of you. I have never loved a person more than I have loved you.

  You think I only love you in the “of course” way. That I always loved myself more, that my work was always more important.

  You don’t know how great and terrible the “of course” way is. You are able to accept things without reasons. I do not have that. The only thing I accept without reason is loving you.

  I worried, when I was pregnant, that I wouldn’t feel the proper mother things when you were born. I did. I felt them all. And then I arranged things so that I could live my life exactly the way I wanted to. I was so confident it would all work out because I had such a good feeling.

  We all thought this would be when time was hardest for us. We thought we would have too much time. And it feels to all of us as if it is going far too quickly. I believe this is because none of us wants this to be over. It is easier to be here, even if it is a little confusing.

  There isn’t any talking it out, between you and me. I manage, you manage, and maybe that’s the best it can get. This sounds terrible to you, I bet. But it’s the pressure for more that’s eating you up. Think about it. What could I say that would make you feel better? You want me to say I abandoned you selfishly to pursue my own dreams and neglected you?

  I wanted to go to space more than I wanted to be your mother.

  That’s true. If you had ever been to space, you’d understand.

  It’s not true. They are different things. Nothing is comparable to another thing.

  If it walks like a duck, but talks like something else, is it still a duck? Is it a bad duck? Does it have to be a bad duck? Can’t it be another creature altogether?

  We shall go on and on, you and I.

  You will continue to blame me for leaving you, and I will continue to leave you.

  The last thing I want to say is that I feel I have lived a whole life on this mission and I want to do it all over, but do it much better. The strange thing is, I may have the opportunity to do just that.

  But I won’t have that opportunity with you.

  I don’t know what to do.

  You could accept that I’m another mother altogether, and that we have a love that is only ours and so that’s why it doesn’t look like any other kind of love but it’s not a bad love. We could destroy the world and make a new one.

  What can I give you of myself? I need to find something of me that I can give you, that is also something you want.

  SERGEI

  My darling boy, Dmitri,

  I dream all the time of going outside. I don’t mean outside on Earth, with the trees and the sky and the grass and the air and the cool lakes. I mean space. Yesterday I performed a simulated EVA. At no time did I imagine myself to be truly in space. So I will still dream.

  Prime is talking about adding more scents to the exercise simulations. When we are snowshoeing in a pine forest, for example, there will be scent of pine. Also, being able to add scent to the air of our Hab might make us more happy.

  Oh, simulations they can do almost everything. All feelings, pretty much, these can be made. But they cannot tell you what to think.

  Simulation can say, “I want you to be running along cliffs of Dover in Yoshi’s exercise simulation and get healthy dose of biophiliac happiness, sense of communion with nature, and freedom from confinement in small spacecraft.” Simulation cannot say, “And all of a sudden in the middle of this you will remember how your son Dmitri picked up a little frosted cake when he was one year old and went to put it in his mouth but instead smashed it right into his eye.”

  I think you were worried that I should be lonely here, and have no one to talk to. I said that I would talk to my friends, and we do talk. I speak with Mission Control, I write to my friends on Earth or make videos. You and I exchange these letters, and soon we will be back close enough to speak in real time. All of this is an immense silence with words on top of it. You were right about that.

  The world is very colorful and crowded, but really, behind it all, is emptiness.

  Ilya will not have told you. He is a funny boy. By his codes, as I understand them, he will not have said to you: “Papa knows that you are gay. We talked about it.” I asked him to keep an eye on you, to make sure that you don’t do something stupid in order to hide it, or because you are ashamed. He’s waiting for you to say it to him, but he knows that you might not.

  I do know.

  Maybe you will laugh, but I have this hope that your being gay is a sign that you are not as much like me as I fear.

  I like to do very hard things, but this should not be a thing I am proud of, because it is more than liking a challenge. I like to do very hard things because then I know that I am not what my father said I was, which was a meek boy who was afraid. And because he was not so wrong, my father. I was afraid. I was timid, I didn’t want to do many things. I forced myself, over and over.

  It was shameful, to meet so many other people in my life, in my work, all people who loved doing hard and maybe scary thing. That is what they wanted. I didn’t want to do it, I wanted to have done it. You see this difference? I see it, and so often I dislike myself. I wish to be so much better than I am, to change totally my nature.

  Possibly I dislike myself because my father disliked me. The psychologist would say: “Oh, he did not hate you—he hated himself.” I will go so far as to say that it is a possibility he hated both of us.

  Possibly I dislike myself because I think doing so makes me a better man. No. I know that it has made me a better man.

  When I was your age, I used to hit myself. I would strike my own thigh, with my fist. It is absurd to think of now, and I cannot totally remember the circumstances under which I performed this. I was restless, and unhappy. I remember becoming even more enraged, at my inability to hit myself hard enough. There is a tradition in religion of this kind of practice, and as a boy I admired it, although I never struck myself for God.

  Whenever I see people do bad things in the world because they are frightened, I think they are someone like me, who has not forced himself to be better.

  The funny thing is, Dmitri, I forget all this. I forget what I am because I have been so long simulating the man I wish to be that I now believe myself to be this man. I think it’s real.

  In the past, I have only wanted you to see this man, because this is the only man worthy of your love. But now I am sick of simulations and I think, how can I know you love me if you only love this fake person? I know that the only thing that matters with parent and child is how much parent loves child. Child does not have to love you back. But this can only be borne by truly strong people. I am too weak not to care if you love me. Here, in space, I think: he cannot hate me here. But of course you can. Please do not. Please, please, I beg you, my darling boy, I am on my knees to you, do not hate me, please do love me.

  YOSHI

  My dear wife,

  I have been thinking about Pluto and its moon, Charon. There are other satellites of Pluto, but Charon is the largest and closest, so big and so close that they might not be moon and dwarf planet but a double object. It has been suggested that they be reclassified as a double planet, but the International Astronomical Union has so far rejected this.

  Pluto and Charon are in mutual tidal lock. This is different than the tidal lock betwee
n Earth and Luna. We see only one face of Luna, but if you were standing on the near side of Luna, you’d see all the faces of Earth. And if you were on the far side, you’d never see Earth at all.

  Pluto and Charon show each other only one face, never turning away.

  Have I spoken to you about the barycenter? I find it difficult to remember what I have said to you, and what I have only imagined saying to you. I think it not improbable that all our best conversations have taken place inside my head.

  In astronomy, we use the word barycenter to describe the center of mass between two orbiting objects. Our Luna is smaller than Earth, and so the barycenter of Earth and Luna is on Earth, deep within it, actually. Because Charon is so large, and its gravitational influence so great, the barycenter of Pluto and Charon lies outside Pluto. Strictly speaking, Charon does not orbit Pluto, nor Pluto, Charon. They rotate around a barycenter between them. Looking only at one piece of each other.

  I would never have noticed this, perhaps, if I hadn’t seen another woman. That is, I saw Helen in a way that I have never seen you. It was an accident and I do not mean to imply that I fell in love with Helen, as the phrase is understood. It wasn’t the person of Helen that was so important in this moment, it was the sheer size of the person of Helen. It was the enormity. And the realization that this was something she was concealing, packing away, so to speak, in order to make our long confinement comfortable for everyone.

  We are all doing this, of course. But, it made me almost ill to see how much I had been missing.

  I have come to believe that I have loved you incorrectly. I have been orbiting a dream I cannot touch. I only know one of your faces. It is not that I didn’t want to know another face, it is that I loved that one so powerfully.

  Maybe I did not wish to know.

  There is a possibility that you are like Luna, and you see all my faces while I see only one of yours. But, forgive me, I do not think this is true. I think we are mutually locked. Perhaps this is what it means to be married. Perhaps this is what it means to be married to me.

  I saw a little of you, and thought it was everything. I understand that I was wrong. Now I am afraid. I thought we loved each other. How can we?

  Would you rather I loved you incorrectly forever, or correctly but potentially less? Maybe I don’t love you at all. I feel if I could just see you, the way I saw Helen, I would.

  “Yoshi needs somewhere to be.” That’s what my mother used to say.

  • • •

  I AM MORE nervous about seeing you next month than I have ever been about anything. I have this fear that I will not recognize you, that I will walk right past you. Or that you will not recognize me. I don’t know which is worse.

  It is hard for me to imagine that I have other faces than the one I’ve shown you. This is all that I am. Does it seem very, very little to you?

  LUKE

  I can’t believe you all are giving up right at the end,” Mireille says. “Seventeen months of incredibly realistic this and that, and now you don’t want the family members standing there for the landing? This is the finale!”

  Luke had stepped outside the Obber Lab to have this conversation, and walked a short distance down the bike path.

  “Originally we weren’t going to do post-mission isolation,” Luke says. “So it would have made sense for all of the family members to be here, but now we’re running a full quarantine. You wouldn’t be able to see your mom in any meaningful way. We thought that even though you’d normally be here, it might be, you know, very irritating, under the circumstances. For everyone. Family and crew, I mean. Not for Prime. Us. But the plan is to have everyone free to celebrate New Year with their families.”

  This is true and, among other things, means that Mireille will not come to Utah, and he won’t see her, maybe for two more years.

  “Well, what’s two more weeks?” Mireille says. “I’m sorry I won’t get to see Madoka again, though, for a while. She’s been sending me the cutest pictures of her new dog.”

  Mireille has cut her hair short recently; her neck is exposed. Either she has changed her hair to match a shift within her, or she has adopted a demeanor better suited to this new style: clearer, less self-consciously provocative. He knows that Mireille is no longer taking psychoactives, but he also knows that the first ten minutes of any conversation they have will be dictated by whatever pose or attitude she has decided upon. If he thinks she seems clearer and less self-conscious, it will be because that’s what she intends him to think. This is still information.

  “I actually feel a little nervous,” Mireille says.

  “I’m a little nervous too,” Luke says, and laughs a little, like a jackass.

  All the Obbers are nervous. They are two weeks away from landing the crew. The tension in the lab has manifested in a panoply of physical ailments. Luke keeps getting into minor bike accidents. “You are literally,” Nari says, “trying to take one for the team.” It is the same, Luke hears, in Mission Control. On the one hand everyone is a little bit of a wreck, and on the other, even linear-active individuals are greeting each other with hugs.

  Luke, at the bike rack now, kicks it a little, knocking some snow to the ground. Not vengefully, just to propel himself forward by applying a very mild pain.

  Mireille has on a red sweatshirt. From the background—some kind of insulated wall—Luke guesses she is on a break at the studio where she is shooting a video game. It touches him that she has messaged him on a break. Mireille loves her job, she’s always happy doing it. For her to message now might mean she’s not seeking comfort, or an audience, but wishing to share happiness.

  “I was always more nervous at landings than launches,” Mireille says. “Sad at launches, and terrified at landings. Which would you pick: being sad or being scared?”

  “Scared,” says Luke.

  “Scared is incapacitating, though.” Mireille plays with the zipper of her sweatshirt. Her face and neck, her chest, are still faintly dotted by whatever sensors they stick on her when she’s working.

  “Sadness can be incapacitating too,” Luke says.

  “True.” Luke heads toward the X-4 building. He hasn’t been on the roof of X-4 since before Eidolon started. He remembers looking down, and seeing Helen in a yellow shirt. Nari wearing binoculars. Remembers his own sense of finally, for the first time in his life, seeing some kind of hope for himself and the other humans of the planet.

  On screen, Mireille strokes the side of her neck, exactly in the same way Helen had adopted in Red Dawn.

  “Do you know what it felt like?” Mireille says. “Like a storm that was always coming, but never arrived.”

  “I’m sorry?” Luke has lost the thread.

  “Eidolon. The past seventeen months. It’s like I couldn’t figure out how to prepare for what’s coming, and I knew I needed to do something, but I couldn’t figure out what that was. I wanted the storm to just hit already so I could stop worrying. But it never did.”

  “That sounds very tiring, Mireille.”

  “Well.” She shrugs. “I was doing it to myself. I think it will be easier when it happens for real.”

  “Oh, that’s interesting. Tell me more about that.” Luke can practically see his words transcribed as he says them, inoffensive, neutral, correct. What would he say if he was not bound by any constraints? Nothing. It was the constraints that had created the situation. This was perverse human nature, not quite corrected even in the humans that had access to better information than their own feelings.

  “For one thing, I won’t be wondering what it will be like when she goes.” Mireille laughs and runs her hands through her hair. “And I won’t be so alone because the whole world will be watching. And getting to share some of the experience. Her experience. It’s going to be her, right? I mean, they’ve passed this part of the training? It’s been a success?”

  Luke push
es open the door of X-4.

  “Sorry, sorry. I know you can’t say. Hey, where are we right now?” She squints at the screen.

  “I’m taking you to the roof of one of our buildings,” Luke says. “There’s a great view of the mountains from up there.”

  “Oh, cool. You can’t see them from there, can you? I mean, you can’t see Red Dawn?”

  “No, no.” In fact, there’d been a rumor around Prime a while back that Red Dawn’s location had been moved. No one had seen any of The Shadows—the team responsible for maintaining the Primitus and Red Dawn sites—for months.

  He flips his screen so Mireille can see the San Rafael Swell, dusted now in parts with snow.

  “Wow,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  • • •

  PRIME’S VR TEAM had brought in sim glasses for the Obbers last week and let them spend ten minutes looking at Mars from space, the way the astronauts had looked at Mars from space two days before landing on the planet.

  Ten minutes. Areocentric orbit. Nearly a year ago, Luke had watched the crew looking at this very thing, listened to them talk to each other about what they were seeing, point out surface features, occasionally laughing or falling silent, or saying something like, “Gosh.” When he looked at the sims himself, he understood the laughter and the silence, the soft “wow.” Virtual reality experiences of Mars had been available since he was a kid, but they had never affected him as powerfully. This didn’t feel like a game, or speculation, or even merely cool. It was personal and vast—not just himself, or even the crew, but humanity approaching, for the first time, another planet.