The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  Even if Dmitri decided to punish his father by no longer loving him, Ilya would still love their father. So his father would have one good son and one bad son and would his father even notice that Dmitri didn’t love him if Ilya still did?

  Yes, to be fair, his father would notice. But his father wouldn’t really be punished. It was no punishment to have your bad kid not love you.

  Dmitri takes another quick look at the girl who is the daughter of the American astronaut. All week long she’d been showing off and smiling at everyone like a crazy person and Dmitri had felt sorry for her even though he could see that everybody else thought she was the greatest thing ever. He was happy to let her be the center of attention. Ilya didn’t have to be the center of other people’s attention. When he was “on,” when his eyes were open, he was the center of his own attention. He was so certain of himself he wasn’t even competitive in the normal way. He’d made one comment about Mireille Kane: “You can totally see her tits in that green T-shirt.”

  But just now, for some reason, it had almost made Dmitri cry to look at her.

  • • •

  MADOKA HAD an idea on the flight to Utah. She’d been arranging with herself the kind of person she would be for the week: supportive, calm, elegant, poised, intelligent. A slightly different version of her work persona, which was a little more energetic and upbeat. Then: inspiration. What if instead of being herself acting like a perfect astronaut wife, she pretended to be an insane person who was pretending to be a perfect astronaut wife? This would lend the time at Prime a certain piquancy, to borrow a Yoshi word. It would give her a secret. It might even be a kind of performance art.

  She would still be perfect, of course, but with a core of madness that wasn’t true madness, but rebellion. There were lots of ways to practice this. For instance, she has been actively trying not to learn people’s names at Prime Space. This is not easy for her: several years ago everyone in Madoka’s company attended a two-day seminar on personal semantic hooking and now the best she can do is try to substitute wrong names using the same method, resulting only in her acquiring several names for every person. She tells herself that the person introducing himself is Peter, who looks like the Disney Peter Pan, but she has already connected his real name—George—with the English word gorge, which connects to George’s job in Prime’s Food Science Laboratory.

  “Have you met Yoshihiro’s parents?” Madoka makes formal introductions and gives Peter Pan Gorge George her doll smile. “That’s very interesting,” she says. And, “I’m enjoying myself.” Also, “Oh, thank you. I know that he wants very much to contribute.”

  Yoshi’s parents have been very pleased with Prime Space, but Yoshi’s parents like everything about their son being an astronaut except for the part where he goes to space, so they’re delighted to have him safely entombed in a simulator for seventeen months. “We will worry about the other thing later,” Yoshi’s mother says, meaning Mars.

  Madoka is glad her own parents had felt it sufficient to say good-bye to Yoshi before he left Japan. Her mother would have noticed and commented on how Madoka has been acting. Yoshi’s parents only care about Yoshi, although Tanaka-san had praised her during his speech last night. He’d compared her to the calm and steady waters that greet a ship after it has sailed through storms, and also to the gentle wind that swells the sails, and finally, to an anchor that holds the ship steady. It was another moment to be glad of her mother’s absence, as her mother would not have appreciated the idea that Madoka existed solely as a kind of ancillary tool to the Voyages of Yoshi, even though it was a theme with her mother that Madoka was not a truly successful wife: did not understand Yoshi, or fully appreciate him.

  “Marriage is a mirror” was Madoka’s father’s advice to her on the day of her wedding. “Sometimes it is challenging, to see yourself in this way. It can be frightening. You must face these fears together.”

  But Yoshi didn’t have fear, because he was always thinking about the things that could go wrong, and arranging himself to handle them. He anticipated everything; there was no situation he had not created an internal checklist against.

  George is now introducing the person who designed the Mars landing simulations. She has the exact shade of red hair that Madoka and her best friend, Yuko, had tried to get when they were teenagers. They’d bleached and dyed streaks, which had resulted in a kind of a pumpkin-colored frieze. Yuko’s mother had gone crazy, but Madoka’s mother had just laughed and said, “When you get bored with that, I can help you dye it back.” Madoka’s father had called her kabocha for months. Madoka arranges with herself to remember the game lady as Pumpkin. Pumpkin is very short, and is wearing a T-shirt with the words But I’m Huge in the Kuiper Belt printed below a small blue planet. Pluto.

  Pumpkin perches on a chair next to Madoka and launches into an extremely technical monologue about tactile sensor arrays. Madoka, whose primary job is to explain to health care workers how her company’s robots can be used, not how they were designed, makes polite mhms and tries not to look bored. She is tired. Performance art is exhausting. It was hard to know what to do when you are pretending to be a crazy person who is pretending not to be crazy. An artist needed to make more specific choices, maybe, otherwise it was too much like you were a crazy person. But which choices were the right ones?

  “And you’re a roboticist for Shin’yu?” Pumpkin is asking.

  “No, no.” Madoka waves this title off. “I work in sales.”

  Madoka has decided to be modest about her role because a crazy person who is Global Chief Sales Operative for a company that is the world leader in robotic caregivers might believe she is the head of an army of robotic nurses who are going to slaughter humankind, and if that crazy person was trying to seem normal, she might throw people off by saying, “I work in sales.”

  Two more Prime people join their table. Madoka continues her subterfuge techniques. One thing about Prime is that a lot of the people here are very eccentric and artistic, so her appearing to be quite normal is maybe making her seem boring, but that’s good. To not be boring, but to seem boring, is the most rebellious act you can pull off.

  Since Madoka was a small child she had harbored this sense that she had a gift inside her, that she was marked. But she preferred to wait for the thing—whatever it was—to emerge. For school club, Madoka had chosen English and Volleyball. She was no machine, like her mother, who could just sit down and grind out her long poems, working every day. So, her mother was disciplined, so what? She was disciplined at making long poems that were only pretty good, not great, and certainly not perfect. Did the world need another pretty good poem? It did not. Besides, a pretty good poem made from typing consistently five hours a day could hardly be said to be art. Even her mother shied away from calling herself an artist. “A craftswoman.” Though apparently she felt that a craftswoman was still something more profound than a robot ambassador.

  “You should have a creative outlet,” her mother was always saying. “You know what happens to salarymen. You need to make sure that you aren’t neglecting your soul.”

  The robots had no souls, it was true, but Madoka was hardly a salaryman. She was very engaged with her work, and her work was important. There was real help that robots could provide for the lonely, the aged, the infirm. Who would take care of these people if the robots did not? Even in countries with an immigrant population willing to do low-wage jobs, you saw all kinds of horrific abuse and neglect. By people who were full of a soul, by the way. And even good people had limitations. They needed to sleep, they needed to go home to their families, they got distracted, they made mistakes and bad choices.

  Fear of robots was something she could not understand.

  Pumpkin is shaking Madoka’s hand and saying that she thinks Yoshi is the most awesome person ever.

  Yoshi is the most awesome person ever. And Madoka is his awesome wife, because that’s the way he im
agines her and that is the person that he loves absolutely. When they’d made love last night he’d been very passionate and tender to the person he thought she was.

  Madoka knows what the dynamic between herself and her husband looks like to others, because it is a thing space agencies like to know and it is a thing she and Yoshi have been evaluated on, separately and together. She knows that they look solid, they look strong. Trusting. Supportive.

  All of this is true. None of it is not true.

  Solid is not true. She would say her marriage is solid, but only because the words people use to indicate happiness are so unnuanced. Not that her marriage is fragile; it’s more that her marriage might be only a solid surface, with nothing inside it. But all relationships between people might be this way.

  Madoka looks around the room.

  The American girl has been doing some kind of performance too this past week. Madoka knew better than to accept any of the overtures of friendship coming from Mireille Kane. Madoka’s adolescence, young adulthood, and early adulthood had all been marked by a close female friendship. Certainly these relationships had felt solid. She had felt seen by these friends, and had shared all the parts of herself that she could think of to share, and even invented some. Every single one of those friendships had ended, which was embarrassing because Madoka had been raised with the idea that female friendships were the most enduring kind, and friction between women was an invention of the patriarchy.

  Yuko had liked a boy who had preferred Madoka, and when this was learned, Yuko had never spoken to Madoka again. Everything they had created together was gone in an instant, erased. Emi had been the best friend Madoka ever had, until it became clear that Emi never truly liked Madoka, but rather envied and resented her to the point where her only solution was binding Madoka into an increasingly uncomfortable intimacy. Madoka had been forced to end that one. Asuko had dropped her without a word or explanation. Later, Madoka heard that Asuko had done the same thing to another woman, but it didn’t make Madoka feel any better. There’d been no official break with Hana, but like most of Madoka’s women friends, Hana now had small children and had been absorbed into the world of other women with small children.

  It was not an awful situation: Madoka didn’t genuinely like that many people. But still. She would not try to be friends with the American astronaut’s daughter, though Madoka had caught that moment of the girl’s rage just now, and had felt something. Relief?

  “Yoshi is my best friend,” she tells people, and she knows he says the same of her. And yet, she is relieved that he is going to be away for this long period of time, in such a definitive way. It is too much for her, to keep their relationship strong and solid seeming, to protect them both from whatever might not be inside it. It is important not to hurt Yoshi.

  She is a little envious too. For seventeen months he will have an audience, observers who will monitor his voice, and note his eye contact, and count his very syllables. And Yoshi will not just be pretending that he is going to Mars, he will be pretending to be the most perfect person to go to Mars, and maybe he is, almost without question, he is, but that doesn’t mean he won’t have to pretend to be what he really is, because aren’t we all pretending to be who we really are? Madoka would like, very sincerely, to ask someone this question.

  • • •

  LUKE HAS BEEN looking forward to meeting the family members of the astronauts. Prime has assigned each family their own personal liaison, so Obber contact with them during Eidolon will be limited to observing the communications between crewmember and family member. It is thought that family members will initially be self-conscious about the idea that someone like Luke is reading their mail or watching their recorded messages, but will largely forget about it after four to six weeks. (It is not expected that the astronauts will forget about it.) And really, what Luke will be reading is how the messages are received. He will be reading Helen, so to speak, reading a message from Mireille.

  Luke looks over at the Helen Kane table and Mireille Kane catches him out and smiles. Luke tries to look professional and friendly and not like the legions of guys who must hit on Mireille constantly, and also not like someone who buys the Mireille that’s been on display the past ten days. Mireille is a person to keep an eye on. The girl looks like she’s ready to throw something.

  Family members might end up being a more valuable source of insight into the crew than the hundreds of questions the astronauts have answered.

  What is the word or image that you most associate with the word man?

  Sergei, Yoshi, and Helen had all answered the same way: human. All three had given the same answer—human—for What is the word or image that you most associate with the word woman?

  For the question What is the word or image that you most associate with the word human? all three had said: explorer.

  Which only revealed that Sergei and Yoshi and Helen were all very good at answering questions designed to reveal their personalities without revealing anything useful about their personalities. They were canny or artful in similar ways, which was potentially more useful than self-disclosure.

  • • •

  AT THE OBBER TABLE, the talk now turns to Red Dawn II, whose launch date is set for the very day the crew will be simulating launch in Utah. Boone Cross has said that he will not send a crew to Mars without having two Earth Return Vehicles already there: there must be a ride home, and a backup ride, both fully fueled and waiting for the astronauts, or Primitus will not go.

  Nobody is allowed to say the words crash or explosion within a ten-kilometer radius of Prime Space. Suggested alternatives are: RUSE (Rapid Unplanned Separation Event) and learning experience.

  As for what will happen to Eidolon if Red Dawn II suffers a launch pad learning experience in two weeks, that will be very tricky indeed. A crew that knows its real launch date will need to be pushed back, and may be in jeopardy altogether, will not be a happy crew. It’s a tense time.

  Along with launch windows for Mars, there are launch windows for this particular crew. Helen is fifty-three now, will be fifty-seven for the real thing. A two-year delay, maybe a four-year delay, was all she, and by extension the rest of her crew, can afford. Their self-designed Eidolon mission patches have an emblem of three crossed swords: they are Musketeers for Mars, all for one and one for all.

  The Obber team leader, Barkley Ransom, is now proposing a toast. It will be a challenging seventeen months for their group: no downtime except for shift changes, and their bodies and brains will be pushed to the limit of endurance. “But remember,” Ransom says, “what Boone always tells us: ‘If you don’t start every day in awe of what we’re doing here, then you don’t understand what we’re doing here.’”

  HELEN

  Does it feel real?

  Helen knows that she needs to stop asking herself this. It is not a meaningful question.

  Everything is real in some sense. Unicorn is a real word.

  A simulation of reality still exists in time and space and, if you are inside it, has a blood pressure, a heart rate, a nervous system, all the usual suspects. You don’t stop being a real person just because you aren’t in a real place.

  Helen knows what the real thing feels like, and what it feels like to be tested for her physical and mental responses to a simulation of the real thing. There is a difference between the two, although it’s not always as great as people might think. Helen has not felt fear of death in a simulator, but she never felt fear of death riding a rocket, either. In both cases, what she feared was screwing up.

  That doesn’t mean Helen is cavalier about death. She respects death. But she fears failure.

  Still, she was aware—riding a rocket—that she could die. Awareness of imminent possible death is not without beneficial properties. Risk of annihilation can be a key ingredient, like baking soda. A teaspoon or so is sufficient to make all the other components rise up
in glory, but without it? No cake. For some, the edge of death is the only place to find love of life. And having once felt this event horizon and yet escaped, they must return again and again, testing, testing. For these people, alive is not alive. Almost dead is the only alive.

  This is not Helen. She even drives her car at the speed limit.

  But not today.

  There are many things that can go wrong in the first minutes of leaving Earth and most of them come with a decision-making window of less than five seconds. If you are an astronaut it means that you are someone who can assess and react quickly. If you are a great astronaut it means that while your mental and physical reactions operate at top speed, your emotional reactions are stately and glacial. The combination that works best is someone who only needs four seconds to get to: This is what we need to do, and four months to get to: Gee, I’m a little bit uncomfortable.

  Helen is a spectacular astronaut.

  Does it feel real?

  Well, it doesn’t feel like nothing, that’s for sure. There is a mighty shaking going on and an invisible gorilla is sitting on Helen’s chest. She’s felt this gorilla before, it’s an old friend. You can’t shift the gorilla, you just have to endure it.

  Helen’s physical autonomy is diminished to the limited degree with which she can tense or relax her muscles. She can also move her eyes, and with those she can see her hands, her knees, part of Yoshi’s arm, and, for split seconds, a toy alien above Sergei’s head.