The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  Sergei gives his attention now to the young man at the front of the room: one of the people who will be monitoring Sergei’s psychological health during Eidolon. The astronauts don’t usually attend this lecture series; the presence of Sergei is going to make the young man self-conscious. Sergei knows this and thinks it’s a good thing. He likes this guy, Luke, but you never want these psych types to feel that they have an advantage.

  “All the data we have tells us that crews that share a common language and cultural background tend to do better than less homogenous teams,” Luke is saying. “And more data shows us that mixed-sex teams do better than all-male teams, and that all-male teams do better than all-female teams. But there are gaps in what we know. You have to go outside space exploration to get numbers about sex makeup because there’s never been an all-female crew in space, or even in any analogue environment. And you have to be careful, with these small-sample pools, about your conclusions. For example, some of the problems that came up when mixed-sex crews were integrated didn’t speak to a systemic problem. It was lack of maturity of certain individuals.”

  When Sergei makes an appreciative noise, several people turn to him and smile. They are all aware of him, not just Luke. He is used to this. Being antisocial is not the same as being introverted. Perhaps he was introverted as a child. His father had called him meek. Sergei would never use such a word on his sons. His boys are not meek, but even if they were, he would not shame them with the word. Sergei thinks of Dmitri’s intelligence, his sensitivity, his strength of character. He thinks of Ilya’s athleticism, his grace, his determination. He could not be more proud of his sons. When he thinks of them like this, it is easy to become emotional. This emotion is another source of Sergei’s power. He would not be able to hold his head up if he thought his children could not respect him. To be someone they would look up to guided his actions, in the way God had once done. (He had been a religious boy too.)

  Sergei still loved God, he just didn’t believe in him. He didn’t understand how you could believe in God and still love God. But he was a spiritual person, not a religious person, so he could think with more subtlety on this subject, and still be strong.

  The young man, Luke, has a new image on his screen: a lineup of a dozen humans, snow-suited in blue and red, arms around one another, posing in front of a cylindrical building set against an Arctic tundra.

  “Dome C,” Luke says. “Concordia Station, Antarctica. The largest desert on Earth. At the peak of summer the temperatures barely reach a balmy minus twenty-five degrees Celsius. A cold winter will fall below minus eighty. There are months when the harsh weather conditions mean communication is interrupted by radio static and planes are unable to land and deliver supplies. Months of darkness. Typical winter population: four technicians to maintain the station, nine scientists, a chief, a cook, and a medical doctor.” Luke begins explaining how winter-over expeditions have served as good analogues for long-duration space missions.

  Sergei has never been to Antarctica, but he participated in a training expedition in the opposite direction, Devon Island in the Arctic Circle, also somewhat Mars-like, in terms of terrain. He almost shot a polar bear during that campaign. He was out with a small team, testing a prototype Mars Hopper, nicknamed Bugs. As was protocol, an extra crewmember rode along in the truck with the sole task of keeping an eye out for polar bears, handling the bear bangers and, if necessary, firing the large-caliber Springfield rifle. In the past, one could divide the Arctic bears one encountered into four categories: curious bears, hungry bears, irritated bears, and defensive bears with cubs. Now, the Arctic bear was never merely curious, curiosity being a luxury reserved for those who are not starving. A sharp eye and vigilance were required, due to the white-on-white situation of polar bear spotting in the snow.

  There was a problem with Bugs the Hopper. One of its four legs snapped out during a maneuver, narrowly missing Jacqueline’s head, and tipping the whole vehicle at a dangerous angle. Paul, who was on bear duty in the AT38, thought Jacqueline had been hit, and climbed out of the truck in a panic, leaving his rifle on the seat. As soon as Sergei assured himself that Jacqueline was unhurt, Sergei saw Paul standing there empty-handed, and then Sergei saw the bear.

  You would think that the sight of Earth’s largest carnivorous land mammal less than two hundred meters away would inspire the same instincts in everyone, but no. Sergei’s instinct had been to get to the rifle. Everyone else’s instinct had been to stare at the bear. The bear’s instinct had been to stand up on its hind legs and show that it was, indeed, a very, very large bear. It dropped back down to all fours and began moving in a circle, which is bear choreography for hunting. By then Sergei had gotten to the truck, and had the rifle. He had instructed the others to group together, to begin backing up slowly to the truck, to make a lot of noise. He had kept the rifle trained on the bear, which ignored all the yelping humans and kept its eyes on Sergei. Paul set off a few flares. The bear stopped. There had been discussion in the truck. Because of their depleted numbers, you could no longer shoot a polar bear on sight, and anyway, there was great reluctance to shoot. Especially when they were all in the truck and could easily drive away, and be good people. They shouldn’t leave an expensive piece of equipment, so Sergei was ready to fire a warning shot if the animal decided to attack Bugs. This didn’t happen. Even a bear knew the thing was a piece of crap. Eventually, the bear simply moved off, and they loaded up the Hopper and returned to base.

  For the next week, the other three had told one another the experience over and over, reviewing all of their thoughts and feelings. They re-created their antibear ululations. They thought out loud about how lucky they were, and paid tribute to the majestic awesomeness of the bear. Sergei kept silent, because what he wanted to say was, “Paul, you fucking moron, you had one job to do.” He had also felt a little bit of guilt, because there had been a moment when the bear was taking Sergei’s measure, and Sergei had experienced a flash of intuition—these sometimes came to him—that the bear was considering him not as prey, but as deliverance. The bear had wanted Sergei to shoot him. The bear wanted to die, did not want to die slowly, unremembered and alone and aching, but the bear did not know how to commit suicide on its own. Evolution had come up short for the polar bear, its habitat destroyed before it developed the capacity for conscious self-slaughter. Why did the bear not charge and force the issue? The bear wanted to be understood. Let there be no mistake about this. Have the courage to release me, not as self-defense, but as an act of grace. But Sergei had not done it.

  The screen behind Luke is now showing an image of an ocean floor: two divers in spacesuits, posing in front of a barnacle-covered portal.

  “NEEMO,” says Luke. “NASA’s underwater research station. Although stays here are short—typically ten to fourteen days—participants receive a full range of physical stressors: fatiguing work, loss of body heat, sleep disturbances, increased chance of ear infections, disorientation, crowded conditions, diet restrictions.”

  Sergei enjoyed his NEEMO rotation on Aquarius. Great time, great crew. Gareth, a British guy, marine biologist, very smart, very funny—they’d become especially good friends, the way you can when you are spending fourteen days with someone nineteen meters underwater in a pressurized sardine can looking at giant grouper out the window. At the time of their expedition, Gareth had just buried his father, and so had Sergei. They’d exchanged stories about going fishing with their dads, although Sergei’s father only took him once. To Kamchatka. Sergei was nine. Just him and his father, not any of Sergei’s three sisters or his mother. The sight of his father scaling the fish while the fish were still alive had bothered Sergei. His father told him that fish do not feel pain like people, and handed him the scaling knife and told him not to be meek. Sergei hesitated. Not out of meekness, but because he did not believe what his father had told him. That is, he had not thought that his father was lying, he thought that his father was igno
rant of the facts. It had been a source of great sadness, to see that his father could be ignorant. It made him physically ill, actually. Sergei scaled and gutted the fish under his father’s precise instructions and then vomited next to the cleaning station. His father washed both vomit and fish guts away with a hose. Sergei told this story to Gareth, and they’d had a good laugh, because Sergei was an amusing storyteller and Gareth’s dad had also been kind of an asshole.

  Luke moves on to a series of images from submarines. Pressurization concerns, catastrophic outcomes for loss of power, radiation exposure, severe space restrictions.

  Gareth told Sergei that current research suggested fish do not experience pain in the way humans do. “Pain in humans,” Gareth explained, “is a process. The nociceptors send electrical signals through nerves and the spinal cord to the neocortex of the brain, which then processes the data into conscious pain sensations. Fish don’t have a neocortex and they don’t have the C nociceptors that mammals have.”

  “So, my father was right,” Sergei said.

  “Well, the only thing we know is that fish probably do not have pain that is humanlike pain,” Gareth said.

  So, his father was still wrong. Fish could have fish pain. Which could be worse than human pain.

  Luke has a new image up on his screen: two men and one woman on the space station. Flushed, smiling faces, shorts and T-shirts, sunglasses, goofy smiles. He recognizes the module: Kibo. One of the women is Helen. Great legs, Helen, even in micro-g, where everybody got chicken legs.

  “Like submarine crews, astronauts on the International Space Station need to be able to function at the highest level in the face of imminent catastrophe,” Luke says. “And like winter-over teams in Antarctica, they also have to tolerate boredom and low levels of stimulation. Basically, we have all the stressors of the three previous extreme environments and a few new ones. Of course, daily life on the ISS is dominated by microgravity conditions, which—because of the centrifuge—will play only a very brief role in the MarsNOW mission. But certainly, as the space station comes to the end of its mission and lifetime, we must acknowledge how much it has taught us . . . ”

  That polar bear I didn’t shoot is almost certainly dead by now, Sergei thinks.

  The next slide is a triptych: Helen, snow-suited and beaming in front of Dome C; Yoshi, wetsuited and grinning next to the portal of the NEEMO station; Sergei, T-shirted and smiling on the ISS.

  “All of these analogue environments have given us good information on the kinds of psychological factors that participants encounter in long-duration missions,” says Luke as the screen behind him begins to fill with bullet points.

  Sergei is skeptical about this data. He respects research, but he himself fills out self-reports in as minimal and neutral a way as possible, and pretty much all the other cosmonauts and astronauts he knows do the same, so these books of data Luke is talking about will have been provided from the handful of people who are willing to chat about problems, and the person who is willing to chat about problems is always the person with the most problems, the person that everybody else on the team thought was a pain. If, preparatory to the Arctic experience, idiot Paul had been given a test to evaluate whether or not he would’ve left the rifle in the truck, he might very well have passed the test. Was there anything in Paul’s profile that indicated he would start fucking Jacqueline, and be jealous of Tim, and so leave his rifle in the truck when he thought Jacqueline was hurt?

  “. . . and so we can identify seven major factors for psychological stressors in the kind of long-duration mission we will be facing with MarsNOW,” Luke is saying. “Increasing distance from rescue in case of emergency. Proximity to unknown or little-understood phenomena. Reliance on a limited and contained environment where a breach of seal means death. Greater difficulties in communicating with Ground. Decreased availability of technological advice from Ground. Diminishing available resources needed for life and the enjoyment of life.”

  Sergei does appreciate how Prime is thinking seriously about these things. And, to be fair, they knew something about crew selection because look at himself and Yoshi and Helen. Could not ask for better. Yoshi and Helen would not leave the rifle in the truck.

  “And all of this good information,” Luke says, “pretty much falls apart when we turn to sending three people to Mars.”

  The list on the screen dissolves and is replaced with a GIF of an old sci-fi horror movie: three absurdly dressed astronauts covered in lurid green slime, with What is happening? in text below them.

  This gets a laugh from the room. Sergei smiles. For the first time, Luke looks directly at him. Sergei decides that he will respect Luke. This is not the same thing as saying that he will trust him.

  “I exaggerate.” Luke holds up his hand. “But three is a very tricky number for group data in general, and Mars has a lot of X factors. Happily, we have a solution.” The GIF is replaced by an image of the Eidolon simulators sitting in a valley of the San Rafael Swell. A small cheer goes around the room.

  “Mostly the solution lies in us finding the right questions to ask,” Luke continues. “Not finding the individual with the right stuff, but finding the group of individuals that will combine to form the right stuff. Not asking them to deal with the environment we have created for them, but creating the right environment for them to deal with whatever they encounter. Eidolon is the next evolution in the analogue environment. The only thing more realistic than Eidolon will be the real voyage. In many cases, the two are going to be practically indistinguishable.”

  Luke fiddles with his computer and backtracks to a discussion of Mars analogue simulations comparable (though inferior) to Eidolon. Sergei, who has read this data before, begins typing a message to his sons.

  Talia is coming to Utah with the boys, but without Alexander. Sergei wonders if she will agree to have sex with him, if he asks in the right way. That part of their relationship had always been quite fine, and she is a generous woman. He will know when he sees her. He can always tell.

  He would like to talk seriously with Dmitri about things. Words, though. You could be the father (or Father) that talks and talks and nobody believes anyway, or you could be the father that shows. It is better to be the father that shows, so that is what he will do.

  MIREILLE, DMITRI, MADOKA, LUKE

  Mireille thinks about hurling the plate of food in front of her. I am going to throw this plate right at the wall and then jump on a table and just start screaming.

  But she has handled it all so well. She has been the incredibly supportive, funny, charming, lovely daughter. No other family member has performed so admirably in the past two weeks. The Russian boys are handsome, but the older one is snobbish and the younger one doesn’t give a shit, and they are both a little rude. Yoshihiro’s wife, Madoka, lacks charisma and most of the time has a sort of fixed-stare niceness like someone who has been forced into a beauty pageant at gunpoint. The little Japanese parents are adorable but shy, and the Russian wife is ex-wife, and only there as chaperone to the boys. Mireille is clobbering the competition.

  Mireille tells herself that she needs to stop drinking wine; her alcohol-induced merriment is both masking and exacerbating her unhappiness, and having wrung as much mileage as she could out of being wonderful, she might now (accidentally) see what kind of numbers she could run up on being difficult.

  She will not do this. Difficult never feels as good as you want it to.

  Boone Cross says that Eidolon is preparing them all for the unimaginable, which obviously makes no sense, and anyway, Mireille is not convinced that the real event will be the kind of gonzo level of fame and celebration and global attention that Prime is anticipating. In Mireille’s opinion, people in the space industry tended to vastly overestimate their audience. Yes, there were space nerds who had memorized every detail of every mission and would corner Mireille when they knew who she was and space-splain all o
ver her. But there were more people like Yola, from her acting class, who asked Mireille, “Have we landed people on Mars yet?” All during the past two weeks, Mireille had kept the idea of Yola’s cluelessness in her mind as an option to weigh against the This Is a Very Big Deal presentation happening at Prime Space. Because of course you couldn’t help it. You got around these people, and listened to them talk, and saw what they were doing, and pretty soon you too thought that human beings had never done anything finer than space exploration, and no goal was more worthy.

  There was something funny about the idea of throwing the plate of food at the wall and jumping up on the table. “Simulate this!” she could shout.

  Mireille tells herself to stop drinking at once. It was going to be a long night, and she still needed to be on.

  For tonight’s dinner, Prime has let the families seat themselves, and the little tables have filled according to astronaut allegiance. All the entourages are small; Team Helen numbers have fallen. Uncle Francis and Aunt Hillary had taken Gram back to New York once Mireille’s mother had gone into quarantine. Now it was just those odd satellite family members who always showed up for space things, and are Helen superfans and who will go home and continue to be experts on all things space to their friends and are loving it. Weirdly, her mother’s younger brother had shown up yesterday but left this morning. Bitter Phil, Mireille calls him. Thinking of her mother having to swallow a dose of Bitter Phil during the visitation hour makes Mireille feel protective of her mother.