The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  And Luke will be spending the next couple of years observing three of the best examples of Homo sapiens, and maybe making some contribution to helping Earth’s best humans take off from a moving object and fly more than fifty million miles across space to another moving object, and land, and stand where no human has stood. When Luke had seen the mission control room of Prime Space, he’d almost burst into tears. And when he made a humorous kind of comment about his emotion at communal dinner, everyone murmured some kind of “yeah” and “me too.”

  They reach the top of the staircase. Nari half turns and body slams herself with accuracy against the metal door, which swings open.

  Before them, to the north, the majestic outlines of the San Rafael Swell. The swell is a result of plate quivering in the Paleocene, somewhere between forty and sixty million years ago, a time of mountain building known as the Laramide Orogeny. Luke knows very little about geology, but is struck by the sensuality of the language, so different from that of cognitive science. The Laramide Orogeny sounds to him like the secret parts of a woman, perhaps a woman from Wyoming, passionately arrived at, like the swell, through a long series of pulses and quivers and persistent thrustings in the dark.

  To look at now, the swell is austere and harshly alien. Which makes it a reasonable analogue for the Mars portion of Eidolon. Tucked into a valley among the mountains are the simulators the astronauts will be using: the exact models of Primitus, the craft that will take the crew to Mars, and Red Dawn, the one that will bring them home, plus two Rovers and supply pods, and the processing plant. The site is closed to everyone but a special Eidolon team, affectionately known around Prime as “The Shadows.” Luke has seen mockups of the spaceships around the space center. He cannot quite believe they are real. That is, that something exactly like them is real. He has also been to Hangar A at Prime’s launch center in Texas. They hadn’t let him inside to see the heavy-lift Manus V rocket—the real one—that will shoot Primitus to Mars, but just the size of the hangar caused a primitive animal response in his body: the hair on his arms and neck had stood on end. Afterward, on the flight from Texas to Utah, he’d become incensed by the behavior of his fellow passengers, unable to bear the cognitive distance between human beings who could dream and then make a Manus V, and human beings who selfishly crammed an extra bag into the overhead compartment.

  Nari joins Luke at the roof’s perimeter wall and points out a few landscape features. She takes a deep breath and tilts her face to the sun, holding her hands over the lenses of her glasses, then brings her head down and blinks through her glasses at Luke in a friendly way.

  “You have a favorite astronaut yet?” she jokes.

  “Oh cool, we get to have favorites,” Luke jokes back. In truth, he has noted in himself a special preference for Helen Kane.

  “Yoshi is sort of the perfect man.” Nari fiddles with her spectacles. “He’s a pilot, he’s got degrees in aerospace engineering. He plays the piano. He was a star baseball player in high school. He’s an environmental activist. He’s like”—she makes her voice exaggeratedly teenager-ish—“evvvvverything.”

  “He’s also the only person I’ve ever heard use the word ‘recondite’ in a sentence,” Luke points out.

  Of course, the thing about Yoshi that was truly remarkable, the thing about all the astronauts that was truly remarkable, was their level of control. Whatever their neurophysiologic or biochemical responses, when it came to behavior, the astronauts played a long game. A mission to Mars would be a very long game indeed, and Luke was going to have a front-row seat.

  More, much more, than geeking out on how we are going to get to Mars, or why, or what we should do when we get there, what Luke wants to understand is who. Who are these people that can withstand such a trip, the danger, the risk, the isolation, the pressure? What can these people teach us? Because if we—the species—might eventually do something like move to another planet, it would be better if we made a few improvements on ourselves first, if possible.

  Understanding the brain wasn’t like understanding mathematics, or physics. It wasn’t an enlargement of our collective understanding of the universe—it went the other way. At a certain point, you had the thing in your hands and a colossal responsibility. The brain could be altered. The brain clearly, in many cases, should be altered. Which was ethically complicated and had been giving Luke very weird, splitting-the-atom-type dreams for the past three years before he came to Prime.

  Now I am become Amygdala, the destroyer of worlds.

  When yet another round of behavioral experiments on undergraduate volunteers started giving you delusions of apocalyptic grandeur it was time to rethink your career trajectory. He is very happy to be here, doing this work. He sleeps well at Prime.

  “There they are!” Nari cries out. She is leaning over the edge of the perimeter wall, looking down. Luke tries to follow her line of sight but isn’t sure what she is exclaiming over. Nari takes off her glasses and hands them to Luke.

  “Do not look at the sky,” she says. “The filter isn’t on and the sun will damage your eyes. Look down. Two o’clock.” She grips Luke by his elbows and moves him into position.

  “They are binoculars.” Luke adjusts the frames of Nari’s glasses, focusing.

  “Yeah, this guy in Prime NeuroErgo gave them to me,” Nari says. “They’re prototypes. So, do you see? Two men, one woman? By the green building.”

  Luke can see. It is Sergei, Helen, and Yoshi. He has not seen them in person before this. The binoculars are powerful; he can pick out details of their clothing. Sergei is wearing a gold bracelet. Helen has on a yellow shirt. Yoshi is smiling, saying something to the other two that is making them smile as well. Nari tugs Luke’s elbow and, with some reluctance, he hands the glasses back to her.

  Astronomers, he has recently learned, have a slightly condescending attitude for the general public’s love of what they deem “pretty pictures.” The highly color-filtered images from the space telescopes may capture Joe and Jane Public’s interest, but astronomers get turned on by spectra, by data.

  Luke has been looking at the data of Sergei and Helen and Yoshi for so long that he finds the sight of their corporeal selves almost shocking. This is not the way he knows them, and it is exciting to see them like this. It is good—humbling—to be reminded of how little he might actually know. For example, nothing in Helen’s data suggests that she would choose a yellow shirt.

  HELEN

  Years ago, while training at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab, Helen’s instructor Jeff had told her, “Don’t fight the suit. The suit will always win, no matter how strong you are. Your key to success is going to be: sink and melt. Just like those experiments we did as kids with cornstarch and water? If you try to jab your fingers all stiff through cornstarch and water you’ll encounter a solid. But if you sink and melt your hands on the surface, you’ll move right through it. So that’s what you gotta do. You gotta tell your hands to sink and melt. Sink and melt.”

  Helen counts this advice as one of the most profound she has ever received, and has made periodic attempts throughout her life to apply it in other areas: Sink and Melt Feminism, Sink and Melt Departmental Politics, Sink and Melt Parenting. The approach has been most successful inside a spacesuit.

  Helen is inside a Prime spacesuit now, and outside a life-size mockup of Primitus. Both these things—Helen and Primitus—are submerged in Prime Space’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab. The spacesuit is pressurized, tethered with umbilical cords to a life support system, and weighted to mimic the conditions of microgravity. Helen’s current position inside it is not comfortable. She is upside down, and though the spacesuit is neutrally buoyant, she is not; her shoulders are bearing her full weight. Helen flexes her feet inside her boots, anchoring herself like a bat to take the pressure off her shoulders. Inside the gloves, her hands feel unpadded and fleshless. She has been in the water for almost six hours.

  H
elen unlocks the Body Restraint Tether anchoring her to Primitus, and clips it back on the mini workstation attached to her chest. She makes the “okay” sign to the utility diver next to her and slowly brings her feet down, righting herself in the water, feeling the suit shift up off her shoulders and the blood rush from her head. For the last twenty minutes she has been gritting her teeth so hard she can barely open her mouth. But Helen has done everything she was supposed to do, in the time allotted to do it. If smiling wouldn’t be painful, she would smile.

  “Helen’s the bolt whisperer,” says a utility diver, when they are back on deck. “I heard you had the best hands in the business.” He offers Helen a fist bump of approval.

  The time to review her performance is in debriefing, and the praise is not appropriate. Still, to refuse a fist bump would look surly, not modest, and so she fist bumps. A trainer removes the shoulder pads from Helen’s Liquid Cooling Ventilation Garment, and Helen tries not to wince. After crawling out of the spacesuit, Helen had been offered a chair and a Snickers bar, and refused both. She is not confident that after a few minutes of sitting she will be able to go from sitting to standing in an effortless way, and it’s easier for the Nutrition Team if she only snacks on what they give her to snack, at appointed snacking time. The chlorinated fug of the lab’s atmosphere stings her eyes after the sterile confines of the spacesuit. Helen swings her arms and assesses the level of stiffness in the rest of her body. She forces herself to chat and joke for a few minutes more before sliding her feet into paper slippers and making her way to the donning cubicle at the far end of the pool, trying not to look like a person who is running for the bathroom.

  Helen talks to herself, naming the things she is doing as she does them, a trick for letting her body know who is running the show. I am unzipping the LCVG and hanging it up, peeling off the long underwear and folding it neatly before tucking it into the laundry bin. I am making a triangle of the diaper I thankfully did not have to use and placing it in the trash along with the paper slippers. I am grabbing a few cleansing wipes and sweeping them up and down my body. I see that there is a toilet adjacent to the Donning Cubicle, and I will use it now.

  Once she is seated, she lets her interior monologue and body collapse, curving her spine forward and spreading her knees so that her head can hang between them. She places her hands on her cold feet and allows herself five deep breaths. Her body is doing what it has always done, which is to exceed expectations, but it costs her a fraction more than it has in the past, and this must be concealed.

  It is funny that Prime, whose VR simulators are realer than real, would have them training in something as old-fashioned and flawed as a pool. You got drag in water the way you never did in space, and tools stayed put if you let go of them. It was, however, a good way not just to train an astronaut, but to test her: the two verbs being more or less synonymous. The day Helen stops being tested is the day no one needs her.

  Last night, Helen had her first dream of walking on Mars. It was a very silly dream—she had been holding up an umbrella over her spacesuit to “keep the sun off”—but the atmosphere of the dream had been cheerful.

  On Earth, Helen has had many dreams about being in space, but usually these involve minor aggravations, spooled out slowly. Failing to cap off her squeeze bottle properly in microgravity and spending hours cleaning up her soup. Realizing at step seventy of a hundred-step checklist that she missed step five and must begin again. An alarm bell that will not stop ringing no matter what she does.

  She has never dreamed, on Earth, of walking in space. This is a source of frustration: why does her subconscious not give her the best thing she knows? The perfect thing, the incorruptible thing. The thing you wanted to get into your speeches about why space exploration is important but never quite could. You always had to fight against bad human history when trying to make people understand what is important. If only the telescope had been invented a few hundred years earlier, it might have been Science, not God, and Michelangelo could have filled an Observatory with images of the cosmos, and Mozart would have written a requiem for a star, and you wouldn’t have to explain anything.

  After she had completed her first spacewalk, her commander had said to her, “Helen, you’ve just walked in space, and that’s something no one will ever be able to take away from you.”

  The phrase is funny. “Something that no one will ever be able to take away from you”? It should be “something that you will not be able to lose due to your own negligence or poor decision making or the endless interference of nonessentials.” Helen sees the value in occasionally giving others inaccurate reassurances, but holds herself to a different standard. Everything is something that can be taken away from you.

  Her five seconds are up.

  After debrief, Helen meets Sergei and Yoshi at E-Lab. The two have spent the morning in launch simulations for Red Dawn. If all goes well, Helen will never do a solo Extravehicular Activity, like the one she practiced today. If all goes well, Sergei and Yoshi will never launch from Mars without her. These are contingency plans: situations that must be rehearsed in case something critical fails or one of the three astronauts is dead.

  For the next four hours, Helen, Sergei, and Yoshi practice medical techniques on a synthetic androgynous human figure they have christened Sam. The astronauts are watched over by a team of doctors who take turns announcing a different medical emergency, and complicating Sam’s condition midtreatment. On the space station, situations like toxic exposure or kidney stones or appendicitis are considered evacuating conditions, but there can be no evacuation on a mission to Mars.

  Today, Sam suffers burns, fractures a hip, needs a tooth pulled, has a heart attack, requires CPR, receives the Heimlich, and loses an eye. The astronauts do not pretend to offer Sam anything like a realistic bedside manner, but indicate at what moments they might engage in something like a bedside manner.

  “At this point, I encourage Sam to take shallow breaths.”

  “I am now telling Sam to stay calm and focus on my voice.”

  “I will tell Sam to prepare for a slight sting.”

  The astronauts are not given protocols on how to examine Sam’s gynecological equipment. The thought occurs to Helen, as she watches Sergei and Yoshi cut away Sam’s pants and then modestly drape Sam’s pudenda in preparation to treat an abdominal wound, that the noninclusion of Sam’s reproductive organs is, when it comes to her, accurate. There had been other options for the common fibroid tumors discovered a decade ago in her body, but why hang on to a uterus or cervix she didn’t need? One less place to get cancer, and with drugs she could fly through menopause without it interfering in her work. Anyway, for her and Sam, there is almost nothing left inside that particular area to see, or go wrong.

  “It has been the day of the dead,” Yoshi says that evening, when they have gathered in the living space of Sergei’s room to study. During breaks they teach one another the ten-minute routines their physical fitness coach has devised for each of them. Sergei is surprisingly graceful, given his compact physique. He tells them that his younger son studies ballet and ballroom dance, and has won competitions. Yoshi demonstrates his ability to perform unsupported handstands. Helen can do the splits, but she does not perform them in her routine. Doing the splits in front of men has no upside unless you want to invite envy or desire.

  “We will have talent night during mission,” Sergei says. “Helen, you play harmonica, yes? You will bring?”

  “I will,” Helen says. “A buddy of mine at JPL made me one that only weighs about twenty grams.”

  “It is good sound for space travelers,” says Sergei. “You can play cowboy songs. We will ask Prime to pack some beans for us, and make simulation campfire video. With simulated sleeping cows in distance. They can give us virtual cowboy hats.”

  Helen enjoys it when Sergei makes gentle fun of Prime Space, although she does not instigate doing it herself.
Throughout her career she has judged it safest to be the one laughing at the joke, rather than the one making it.

  During Eidolon, each astronaut will have a thirty-minute segment in their daily schedule allotted to watching uplinks of Earth news collected for them by their Prime handlers, and they’ve been instructed to indicate programs, sites, and areas of interest. Sergei, Helen, and Yoshi talk through their selections so as not to double up on the same tech and science resources. All three of them want to follow the Chinese lunar landing of Weilai 3. On Sergei’s screen they watch footage released from Xinhua of the taikonauts giving an interview. Images depicting the Chinese flag on the moon are already flying over Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou.

  “How are US flags doing on moon?” Sergei asks Helen.

  “The last time anyone looked four of them were still up. But the UV radiation has almost certainly bleached them completely white.” On the screen now, the last surviving Apollo-era astronaut is speaking. The astronaut is being interviewed, but he is ignoring both the questions and the physical presence of his interlocutor and speaking directly to the camera. The astronaut is a man who has been to the moon, and he will squander no civility on his inferiors, i.e., everyone who has not been to the moon, i.e., everyone.

  “I had a dream that I walked on Mars last night,” Helen says. “I carried an umbrella. I remember someone telling me that you should always ask people to interpret your dreams. You won’t learn anything about your dream, but you’ll learn a lot about the other person.”

  “Was the umbrella open or shut?” Sergei asks.

  “Open.”

  “Then I have no idea what that means,” Sergei says. “I only remember that closed is bad.”

  “I think it is a good omen.” Yoshi hands Helen a cup of tea. “An umbrella is a symbol of togetherness. There. What have you learned about us?”

  “Sergei is a pessimist and you’re an optimist,” Helen says.