The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  SERGEI

  A mie pose is used to demonstrate a powerful emotion.”

  The voice is female, synthesized through computer concatenation, stripped of opinion, not unattractive. On the wooden stage, a kabuki actroid swivels to demonstrate a mie pose: right hand held perpendicular to the floor, left arm bent at the elbow, jabbing upward. The actroid stamps his left foot, crosses his eyes, and freezes. Sergei guesses that this character is expressing impatience, arrogance. The actroid looks like an asshole.

  “The actor’s makeup, or kumadori, is also used to indicate the character of the role,” the voice continues. “Red lines symbolize good traits like heroism and righteousness. Blue or black lines might be used for a villain or a jealous lover.”

  Sergei looks at the red colors on the stamping actroid. He was wrong. This was the good guy of the pair.

  The second kabuki actroid looks too small for his giant kimono. Maybe he is a replacement. He lunges forward and slashes the air with his sword, nostrils flared, black painted eyebrows winged from nose to temple in two steep slashes.

  “These robots,” says Sergei, “are not pleasant.” He imagines his own face painted red and black in equal measure, a heroic villain, the colors running together. It is warm and he has overdressed, he is sweating. He needs to speak to his crewmates today and is having trouble finding the right opening, the correct tone, something between tragedy and comedy.

  Right now, the three astronauts—Sergei Kuznetsov, Yoshihiro Tanaka, and Helen Kane—are standing in a replica of the Kureha-za Theater, originally built in Osaka toward the end of the nineteenth century. Like the other sixty-four buildings spread out across the architectural theme park Yoshi has brought them to, the theater is an example of Meiji-period architecture. The astronauts have already inspected the revolving stage, hand-operated in its day by a crew secreted below.

  “I’ve only seen one full kabuki performance live,” says Helen. “It was amazing.”

  “Then you have an open mind,” Yoshi says. “Kabuki is difficult even for some Japanese; many find it dull, or unfathomable.”

  They troop upstairs to inspect the drummer’s balcony. Two Western tourists, student age, are talking loudly in Japanese. They nod at Yoshi, and ignore Helen and Sergei. Young people do not enjoy being foreigners: these two are clearly wanting very much to be Japanese. Sergei thinks of his sons, who are in America right now. They have said they are excited about this. His younger son, Ilya, is truly so, but Ilya is his own country, a principality of Ilya; he will be happy anywhere as long as he gets what he wants. Dmitri is different. Dmitri doesn’t know what he wants and maybe doesn’t have the power to endure a little suffering for greater good. Sergei hopes that his example is enough of a lesson, but it is hard to be an example at a distance.

  “When I came here as a young person,” Yoshihiro says, gesturing to the figures on the stage below, “the representations were simple cardboard cutouts of kabuki actors. I’m not sure when they installed these robots. Not quite appropriate to the museum, and I agree with you, Sergei, not very wonderful.”

  A Japanese family approaches the stage. The children wave at the actroids, and laugh when they move.

  “Ah, they’re not afraid,” Yoshi notes. “They think they are clowns.”

  “I remember a friend telling me,” says Helen, “that it’s a controversial thing in psychiatric circles—whether fear of clowns is a real phobia, like claustrophobia or agoraphobia, or a notion people pick up from movies or images in the media.”

  “Well. Clowns are much scarier than robots. Clowns. Yeeaachh.” Sergei performs an exaggerated shudder and Helen and Yoshi laugh. It is good to introduce an informal tone to their conversation now, and also demonstrate that he is in a good mood.

  They continue speaking in English as they exit the building. English is the vehicular language of Prime Space, though the astronauts all speak each other’s native tongues. Sergei’s Japanese is fluent and his accent is superior to Helen’s (there is a sound in Japanese—a kind of rolling l/r/u combination that Helen admits to being unable to correctly produce). Sergei’s English comprehension is near perfect, though his grammar has occasional but unimportant gaps. Yoshi’s English has a British inflection; in Russian his tone is more expressive.

  They have been training together for five weeks and although today has been designated as a rest day, Helen and Sergei had accepted Yoshi’s suggestion that he drive them out to this local attraction. “It will be nice,” Sergei said, “to be in a fresh outside place.” Helen had brought binoculars. She’s said she is an amateur bird-watcher, though it is difficult to imagine Helen as an amateur anything.

  It is warm for March, almost cherry blossom season, which they will largely miss, as they are moving to the training facility in Utah in two weeks.

  There seem to be no birds at all in the park. Most likely, insecticide coating on the trees has killed off potential food sources.

  The astronauts are good sightseers. They walk across an art deco–style bridge, view a facsimile of the railway carriage of the Imperial Family, and admire a replica of the entrance hall of the Imperial Hotel. Outside a reconstructed Romanesque church, Yoshi explains that he first visited the Meiji-mura Park when he was ten and newly arrived in Japan after an early childhood spent in London.

  “I remember seeing this,” he said, “and feeling that it was not at all an exotic object, but something more familiar to me than a Shinto or Buddhist shrine. My eye was more accustomed to the Romanesque and Gothic. But you will see that bamboo blinds were employed in the interior of the church, to counteract the heat and humidity of its original site in Kyoto. It made an impression on me, to see the cultures blended so harmoniously.”

  All their talk has been like this so far, and that is good, but also, come on. They have come here in order to speak their thoughts freely, away from Prime, Sergei is certain of it. Only, someone has to start or else they will spend the whole day just saying agreeable things.

  Now the astronauts will have lunch in a pavilion. He will say his news, and then they will talk of other matters, and he will relax.

  Without question, Sergei, Yoshi, and Helen have developed a rapport. Not developed. The rapport was immediate. It probably was there before they met, as an algorithm. Prime was the crew below the stage, revolving the players: them.

  • • •

  IT WAS A CREW that any person who knew what they were doing would assemble. A short list for a mission to Mars that included a woman would absolutely have Helen Kane on it. Sergei had met her only a few times, but she’d spent considerable time in Russia early in her career, and hers was a name you heard often, always in terms of great admiration and respect, even from jerks. They had many friends in common. Yoshi he’d never met—though Helen had worked with him on a NASA–Prime project—but Yoshi’s professional reputation was impeccable and people always said something about how they liked him, always in the same way, too, using almost the same words and emphasis, which spoke well of the guy’s consistency. Everyone had expected Prime to select an all-American crew. That it was international said something important about Prime, and also of the robustness of the data that had put Sergei, Helen, and Yoshi together. Prime was a multinational corporation holding partnerships of some kind with every significant government space agency, but the crew didn’t feel like politics. As a team, they already have flow. Flow is a word Prime likes, uses as noun and verb, subject and object. Even leadership of their crew has flow. Sergei is to command the Earth-to-Mars transit, Helen the Mars expedition, Yoshi the trip back to Earth. Very unorthodox, but Sergei liked this distribution of authority. He wouldn’t have the first boots on Mars under this flow—that honor would be Helen’s—but he was only fifty percent convinced the thing was going to happen anyway.

  Fifty percent was enough.

  They have the pavilion to themselves. The grounds are nearly empty. A couple dres
sed in old time–style wedding clothes pose for a photographer on the art deco bridge. Helen looks at the people through her binoculars, since there aren’t any birds.

  He will get it done now.

  “So,” Sergei says. “I have something I wish to tell you. It is that I am getting a divorce.”

  Yoshi takes a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and dabs his mouth. Helen puts her binoculars on the table. Sergei imagines their thoughts. Their thoughts will be of the mission. They will be asking themselves how precise are the personal variables that have brought them together. There are no margins for error in space. For a mistake that measured 1/50th the width of a human hair, a two-billion-dollar telescope was almost lost. In space, they are all Hubble. No one must think of his emotional state as fragile. Not Prime, not his crew.

  “You are,” Sergei looks in turn at Helen and Yoshi, “the first people I am telling. I will inform Prime of this situation tomorrow, but first I wish to tell you. It will not affect my work. In fact, marriage has not been what it should be for long time, but Nataliya is a good mother, and a good friend. I do not wish my boys to be growing up with a mother who is not happy. Talia, she wishes to have a new marriage. He is a good guy, I know him. I trust him. My boys know him. He is family: the cousin of my cousin’s wife’s brother. He is Russian, but was born in the States, and they will live there. I think it will be better for them, when I am away, to have steady home, to have a man who will watch over them and make their mother happy. I do this for them. This is not easy thing, but . . .” He stops and shrugs, as he had planned to at this point. “It is what happens,” he says. “It is—” He has genuinely forgotten the phrase. “Chhh,” he says, remembering. “Yes. It will be a positive change.”

  The park is too quiet. His words sound a little loud, though he always speaks more quietly when he is in Japan.

  “Sergei, you have our full support.” Helen turns to Yoshi, who nods once, very firmly. “And I am glad that the circumstances are so, well, like you said, really positive. I can imagine that starting the Eidolon training with things not so clear would have been hard, so this probably takes a lot off your mind. To have it settled, and to be moving forward.” She is letting him know what line she will take if asked, Sergei thinks. She will reinforce his view. She will not be the woman who presses for emotion. She does not make a physical gesture, but Sergei can feel the ghost of one, on his back. She is patting his back, like his mother used to do.

  “Yes, thank you for telling us,” says Yoshi. He repeats his emphatic nod. “You have our support, and may I say that I admire very much your determination to do what is best for your children. They are very fortunate to have a father who loves them so much.”

  Yoshi is a good guy.

  Sergei can hear a bird, but he can’t see it.

  “The man she wants to marry owns a shoe company,” he says. “For a woman, the husband who can give lots of shoes is maybe better than the husband who is a cosmonaut, but for my boys I will still be the more cool dad. So.”

  Helen smiles, which is good because in his relief he has made a woman-joke and while Helen’s reputation is of being a person who does not have problems with man-woman things, it’s better not to call attention to this. And he wasn’t thinking of someone like Helen when he said woman; he was thinking of someone like his wife.

  “It will be a little easier for you,” she says, “with your sons in the States. I mean, before we start Eidolon. Less of a time difference for communications. And they won’t have to travel as far if they can come to Utah.”

  “Yes.” Sergei would have been happiest if Alexander and Talia took his children to someplace like Norway, or even Canada, but the advantage to America is that all the evils of the country are known, and his boys will be living in a town in New Jersey that is number three of most safe America towns.

  He appreciates the vote of confidence that his divorce will make no difference to his candidacy for the mission. He does not think it will, but until he is strapped into a seat on top of a rocket that has launched for Mars, he cannot be sure he is going to Mars.

  “So, I will inform Prime tomorrow. I have not lied,” he says. “I thought it would come up in psychological examination. But for me, so far, that has all been tests with hypothetical situation.”

  “Yes,” Yoshi says. “For me as well. I assume there is more to come.”

  “Seventeen months of it,” Helen says, with a small smile.

  It is good, it is over, they are going to be able to talk of other things.

  “Okay,” Sergei says. “Crew meeting.” He makes a joke show of looking around at all the empty tables and underneath their own, taps one end of a chopstick as if testing for a microphone. “Yes. Okay. We are alone. So. Do you think we’re going to Mars?”

  The astronauts laugh.

  “Oh, well, of course we are,” Helen says.

  This is a good tone to take. “Hey, why not? Maybe we won’t, but let’s say we will.” Helen can say this because she has the least to lose of any of them. She is retired from NASA’s astronaut corps, and she’s American, so it is natural for her to be optimistic. Sergei is forty-five and Yoshi is thirty-seven. The space station was nearing the end of its already extended life, and for guys like them it was all about getting tagged for a lunar mission now that the moon is back in play. A single failure in any number of MarsNOW scenarios could mean that all Eidolon will signify is that the three of them are capable of spending seventeen months together in a tin can playing virtual reality games.

  Or they could be the first crew to go to Mars, so there is that little thing. And both he and Yoshi are men from countries whose space agencies are facing the same difficulties and have ties to Prime that they wish to tighten. If the MarsNOW mission gets scrubbed, they will still be the astronauts Prime most knows and trusts, the ones most familiar with Prime systems, the inside-track guys. So, the decision was not so difficult, but he would still like to hear what the others have to say.

  “Yoshi, Mars?”

  “One has gotten so used to speaking with caution on the subject.” Yoshi folds his arms and leans back in his chair. “People ask about a crewed mission to Mars and one says, ‘Yes, yes, it is very exciting to contemplate,’ ‘There are many difficulties,’ ‘We are not quite ready,’ ‘For such a mission we need to consider,’ and so on. You sympathize with the difficulty of getting funding for less glamorous projects. And now, of course, the conversation is about the moon.”

  “There is a lot of paranoia in the United States,” Helen says, “about the Chinese lunar missions. I can’t tell if it’s real paranoia or media hysteria.”

  “Like fear of clowns,” Yoshi suggests.

  “Exactly.” Helen raises an eyebrow. “The official NASA statement is that it’s good for all humankind if China lands on the moon. But we know almost nothing about what is happening, or what their intentions are.”

  “They will land,” Sergei says. “US landed with technology that was not so good as my toaster. But let us not be kidding ourselves—China is not going to shoot golf balls and pick up rocks. They will mine. And they will not be mining for all humankind; they will be mining for China. We are about to be in a big mess, no?”

  “The politics are upsetting,” Yoshi agrees. “This isn’t what we do.”

  “No,” Sergei says. “This is why Prime Space is future. Future with explorers, with scientists, not countries.”

  It will never be this simple, of course, but if they are to do this thing, they must not be countries, the three of them. He will not be the “Russian guy.” For holidays, and a joke, yes, but this is his first act as a commander: let us be our own crew, let us be free.

  “Yes,” Yoshi says. “One must not be naive about the motivations of Prime Space—they are a commercial enterprise. But it would be unwise, I think, to be cynical about this. I have always been impressed with the program: the effic
iency and the vision.”

  “Everyone I know from JPL who went over to Prime says the same thing,” Helen adds. “It’s the direction we should have been moving in all along.”

  “So,” Sergei says. “We’re in the right place.”

  It is cooler in the shade of the pavilion. The astronauts eat misokatsu from zero-waste bowls. The couple in wedding clothes on the art deco bridge have been replaced by another couple, and a photographer. Sergei picks up Helen’s binoculars. The woman wears a dress with fringe and a feathered band around her head, the man a three-piece suit. The woman is not smiling, but the man is, until the photographer raises his camera and the facial expressions of the bride and groom are reversed. Sergei places the binoculars back on the table, catches Helen’s eye. She is maybe looking at him with sympathy. Perhaps he sighed.

  “So, Helen,” Sergei says. “Was it always your dream to go to Mars?”

  “I remember my science teacher in grade school saying that everything we could see in the sky was so far away that it might as well be infinitely far,” she says. “With the exception of the moon.”

  “Ah, did you dream of the moon?” Yoshi asks.

  “No, the moon is too close,” says Helen. She is not joking.

  “Yes,” says Sergei. He has a good feeling now. There is nothing to worry about, apart from the regular things. He is not a man for hoping, but at the very least, he will be tested past the point of exhaustion, and that’s not nothing. “I agree. The moon is much too close.”