The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  “Helen is taking a nap too.” Yoshi watches as Sergei raises a canteen and drinks from it. Yoshi has a similar canteen, filled with water. They can make potable water here, make oxygen from the water, grow food, build shelter. But for all of that they are at the mercy, absolutely, of machines. The robots are despots; man is enslaved. It’s this, perhaps.

  “We are totally dependent on machines,” Yoshi says.

  “Pfuh. Yes. This was what you were having a bad dream about?”

  “No.” Yoshi finds his canteen and drinks. They have been joking that they will make a fortune bottling Martian water, which they will brand as “Sabatier,” in honor of the reaction that produces it from Martian hydrogen and carbon dioxide. They have lemon and orange essential oils to flavor their water, but the water still tastes metallic, or it is the canteen. Or no. He did bite the inside of his cheek. That is iron he tastes—his own blood. Or maybe everything on Mars ends up Mars flavored. Including himself.

  It is okay to be dependent on machines.

  “It is okay to be dependent on machines,” Yoshi says out loud. “No, it’s fine. On Earth, we do, we are. Earth is not really a hospitable planet. Without machines, existence would be pitiful, if you even survived. ‘Nasty, brutish, and short.’ We have made the Earth a place we can live on, with machines. We could not live without them. Earth is only a different kind of Mars, underneath what we’ve made.”

  Sergei laughs softly. His face is green, reflections from the interior lights of the Rover. “You can breathe everywhere on Earth,” he says. “Still. Maybe not forever, but right now.”

  “We are all astronauts.”

  “Yoshi, that is true. But it’s okay. You’re okay. You were dreaming.”

  He is not quite done dreaming, perhaps.

  “I’m not worried about the machines,” Yoshi says. “I don’t think that was the problem. I was thinking I could see devils.”

  “Bff,” says Sergei.

  “Rather like Batman.” Yoshi tries to remember. “The shape of the head. Or something like a manta ray. Yes. A school of blue manta rays, flying above me. Evil things.”

  “Did you have spicy food for dinner? Spicy food gives you bad dreams. Whenever Helen uses paprika, I have a nightmare.”

  “I heard that.” It is Helen’s voice. Her face is not on screen.

  “Yoshi had a dream of scary Batman devils,” Sergei says. “This is anxiety dream.”

  “I think I’ve seen them before.” Yoshi feels as if he is rowing against the current of his own brain.

  “It sounds like a movie.” Helen is trying to be helpful. “Or a cartoon?”

  “The first time I spent time in a sensory deprivation tank.” Yoshi has located the memory. “Yes. At first I closed my eyes—this is an instinct, for relaxation, yes?—and then I became very curious about the darkness. It was my first true opportunity to look at complete absence of light. I knew that it took twenty minutes for one’s eyes to adjust. That’s when I saw the demons. Pointed Batman heads and bodies like rays. It was not, of course, that I believed in their existence. I had read that hallucination in the tank is quite common, for sane people. It’s the schizophrenic who is most relaxed in the absence of stimuli. The demons did not last long. They were replaced by stars. After the stars, my eyes were adjusted and I saw nothing. And never again, in any sensory deprivation situation, did I experience a visual construction.”

  “So this means you are schizophrenic.” Sergei laughs. “If you were normal, you would still imagine crazy things. Helen, you hallucinate in sensory deprivation, of course?”

  “Oh, of course. Rainbow cows jumping through the clouds.”

  “Yes. Me too. I see a baby with a goatee juggling apricots. But that is because we are sane. Poor Yoshi.”

  Yoshi knows they are joking, teasing, even being kind. But his unease, which had subsided, is returning. He remembers, in the sensory deprivation tank, the loss of a frame of reference for his own body. He had moved his torso sideways, bending, and had kept moving until he felt a muscular resistance. At that point, he could have sworn that his right ear was only two or three inches from touching the side of his right knee.

  The perimeters, the edges of life had moved away on Mars. There was nothing here to bind you. Nothing already made. Nothing already constructed. No people who came before you. No culture, no language, no one to recognize you.

  Helen’s face moves fully into frame now on Yoshi’s screen. Her hair is down, the lights of the Rover turning her curls into a nimbus of greenish gold.

  “Hey there, Yoshi,” she says.

  It is okay. He is located, he is found. He is not lost on a distant planet, he—

  “Oh.”

  Yoshi has just remembered that he is not actually on Mars.

  HELEN

  Helen, how is your daughter behaving?”

  Helen moves crablike—the greenhouse aisles are narrow—to the screen connecting her to Sergei, on sortie right now with Yoshi in Rover II.

  “We’re still having some torque issues,” she says. “I’m a little concerned about balance.” Helen angles the screen so that Sergei can have a look at her “daughter”: GAIA. For seven months, GAIA existed only as a computer program the astronauts occasionally consulted or trained with on Primitus; the rest of the robot had traveled in the cargo hold. Helen had been the one to put body and program together—thus, Sergei’s joke about her maternal role. It still jars Helen to see GAIA walking around with her small steps, like a child in her mother’s high heels, handling objects, rotating the wreath of cameras and sensors that serve as her head to focus, occasionally, on Helen.

  “Anyway. You two having fun?”

  “There is no man,” Sergei states, “who does not enjoy flying remote-controlled things.” Yoshi appears behind Sergei at this point, lofting a pressure-suit thumbs-up, all smiles beneath his helmet. When he moves away and Sergei shifts his screen, Helen gets a tantalizing glimpse of copper sands and paler outcropping. Sergei and Yoshi are testing the camera drones on a small hill to the north of the site. Helen would very much like to have gone with them. She likes flying remote-controlled things too. But Yoshi had stayed behind on the Arsia Mons sortie, and she judged that the greenhouse was too finicky a job for Sergei’s current mood.

  Here she is, in the garden of Mars, letting the boys drive the car and play with toys so they don’t get too fretful or have to drink too much liquorice tea. This is part of being commander. It was father and mother rolled into one, Adam and Eve. It was not merely for her skills as an engineer that she had been chosen, nor for her experience. All those data collections suggesting that if you were to put a woman into a crew of men for long-duration space missions, it would be best if the woman were of a “motherly” disposition. Considering her limited skills as an actual mother, this was more funny than offensive, but Helen knew that, without her intending it, certain words or actions would be interpreted as motherly, by virtue of her biology.

  Of course, there was also another definition for “motherly” that read: too old or otherwise not appealing to be considered sexually viable by others. If this was true, it was fortunate that hers was a career where her lack of sexual appeal made her more valuable.

  That’s absolutely how she should think about that. It’s a plus.

  No, truly. That’s how she will think about that.

  “We will be back in one hour.” Sergei points to Rover II, behind him. “If you need help.”

  “Well,” Helen says. “It’s kind of crowded in here already. And I think I have it under control.”

  “Of course you do.” Sergei gives a cheerful sign-off salute. Yoshi can be seen, all but skipping, right behind him. Helen sidesteps back down the aisle.

  “GAIA, let’s finish these nitrate fixers.”

  “Okay, Helen.”

  In Antarctica, the greenhouse had been one of
the most popular places to hang out: the warmest, the best smelling, the prettiest. People strung hammocks so they could sleep there. During Helen’s winter-over, so many couples had used the greenhouse for sex that a warning system had to be devised. A sign was posted outside: CLOSED FOR FILTER CLEANING.

  This greenhouse would not provide such comforts. The structure—inflated and attached to Primitus—was a seriously challenged endeavor, and certainly its current psychological benefits were negligible. This greenhouse received its light from ground LED sensors, and was nearly opaque, its walls treated with UV-filtering transfers, and its roof covered with Martian regolith. A millimeter growth of hairy vetch did not provide much in the way of mood-enriching fecundity. The best you could say about it right now was that it was warm.

  “GAIA,” says Helen. “Someone told me that the first recorded greenhouse was created for the Emperor Tiberius in 30 AD so that he could have cucumbers all year long.”

  “Okay, Helen,” says GAIA. “Would you like me to verify that?”

  “GAIA, no thank you.”

  You had to say the robot’s name to get its attention, otherwise it would ignore voices. This conserved energy, and reduced the occurrence of the robot misapprehending directives.

  GAIA was not her daughter.

  Helen had started out a pretty good mother. She thinks she did well that first year, at least. Meeps had been a small, sweet, stubborn baby, very skeptical but with a sense of humor. Helen had felt like they understood each other and made a good team. She’d loved how much her daughter accepted her and took her for granted. She hadn’t even been terribly bored by the endless repetition, despite Eric’s assumptions. “Poor Helen. This isn’t quite your thing, is it?” and, “Mireille, love, Papa is going to give you a bath so your mother can do something easy, like rocket science.”

  She’d stayed as long as she could. She tried to be extra present when she was with them, and when that proved annoying to everyone, she tried to be unobtrusive in an interested way. She acquired a sense of apology to her daughter, to her husband, a sense of never quite accruing enough credit to make up for her absences. But she’d always thought a time would come when her daughter would find a use for her, for her particularly, and all would be well and they’d be a team again. And then, before you knew it, Meeps was nine, ten, fifteen, eighteen. Then standing by Helen’s side as they put Eric in different kinds of boxes and Helen wasn’t what her daughter needed or wanted at all.

  • • •

  EVERY SOL ON MARS, Helen has said to herself, Oh let me be free. It is like she is cursed, or something. Her entire career, this has never happened to her, these continual slips, these plagued memories, these little struggles. It’s like something is clinging to her.

  “My dead husband told me that flat glass hadn’t been invented in Tiberius’s time,” Helen says. “So the architects put together small sections of transparent mica sheets.”

  GAIA, unaddressed, does not respond. The robot comes up to Helen’s ribs. Meeps had once been the size of GAIA. Maybe at eight? She’d been small until high school, was still shorter than Helen though she wore high heels often. GAIA’s height is adjustable. All four of her arms can extend to the top height of the greenhouse, if need be.

  Meeps at eight. Helen had been flying a desk that year, more available to her family than she had been in the past. Meeps at eight took karate and played soccer. She also performed in her school plays, and sang in the chorus. Meeps was a natural athlete: confident and not self-conscious. If she fell, she got up, kept running. Watching her was a pleasure, was easy, was play. But the actual plays were difficult to watch. All of Meeps’s teachers, and other parents, praised her daughter’s theatrical skills. “So talented,” they said. “What stage presence. A natural.” Helen understood this might be the case, but could not see it. She saw that her daughter was louder, larger, more emotional than the other children. Helen saw naked need, and vulnerability. It made her nervous.

  Helen would not have selected acting as a career pursuit for her daughter, but not because she didn’t value the arts. She believed acting specifically wrong for Meeps. It played to her weaknesses: her ability to manipulate emotions and her need for approval, and ignored her strengths, like her mechanical dexterity and ability to conceptualize objects in three dimensions. Meeps was smart, very smart. Too many things came easily, and she gave up too quickly on the things that didn’t. And she’d ended up wanting to do something that Helen could not help with, advise on, or even intelligently discuss.

  Of course, Eric had encouraged it. It was too much to be hoped for that his keen eye had not detected Helen’s discomfort with their daughter’s theatrical displays. Her uneasiness probably amused him.

  Eric had wanted a child with each of his two previous wives and it had not happened. Helen had known his expectations when they married. She had thought, If I have a child now, then I will not have to stop later and have it. The timing was right. An advanced degree and those critical bonding years could be achieved simultaneously. By the time she would be pursuing astronaut candidacy, Meeps would be in school. It was amazing to Helen, now, that she’d allowed herself to be so vague and optimistic about the whole enterprise.

  Eric had been a wonderful parent. When he was alive, Helen had said he was a wonderful husband. She could still do that. Or she could say something else. Helen could tell GAIA all about it, if Prime wasn’t listening in somewhere. It would be nice to say it aloud. GAIA would listen and then say, “Okay, Helen. Would you like me to verify that for you?”

  Who could verify it? Meeps was the sole audience member for Helen’s marriage. When Helen and Eric were together in public, Eric expressed only praise and admiration for her. In private, she was subject to his loving sarcasm. But she’d allowed that, almost from the beginning. It had seemed fatherly to Helen—she who could not remember the time when her father was capable of chewing, let alone sarcasm. Why had she?

  She’d not had a lot of experience with men. The ones who were her intellectual equals had invariably sought softer mates, and the others had stayed away. Intimidated was the word friends used, though repelled might be more accurate.

  Eric had assigned her an identity. Helen was logical, rational, didactic, meticulous. Not unlike a robot, a lovable robot. Helen was supposed—by Eric—not to be good at a number of things, expressive, feeling-type things. Perhaps she would have protested more against this assigned identity if it hadn’t been for sex. In bed—or multiple locations; Eric was inventive—she had felt known and absolutely at her ease. It did not seem likely that Eric could “get” her so completely there, when she was exposed in every possible way, and “not get” her otherwise. Furthermore, that Eric should assign her a personality that did not seem particularly lovable, and then tell her that he loved her, had seemed significant. She had to think him wonderful. Who else would love the person he described?

  It was, of course, perfectly possible to grasp fundamentals and miss the concept. And then, there had always been a strand of guilt running through the whole thing. Eric had made it clear that he was content to have large parts of his self remain unknowable to her (essentially limited) understanding. This he did out of love. He loved her despite herself so much that he didn’t even expect to be loved back. He didn’t expect more from her. She had been grateful, but only because she hadn’t properly understood the gift.

  Eric had schooled Meeps in the robot version of Helen. She’d made it easy for him: she had left. Not just once, but repeatedly. An astronaut’s job was almost never in space, but it was always training, traveling, weeks away, months away. As Meeps’s father, this would not have been so remarkable.

  She could not now fight back or redeem herself in her daughter’s eyes without throwing dirt on a ghost, throwing dirt on dirt.

  “Helen.” It is Sergei again. Helen glances at her watch. An hour has passed. It is okay. She knows exactly where the Prime c
amera is inside the greenhouse, since she was the one who installed it. Her face had not been in its view and she has been working steadily, so her performance was still nominal.

  “Yes, Sergei.”

  “Nearing the site now.”

  Helen moves so she can take a look at her crewmates’ faces in the cab of the Rover. They still look happy.

  The Arsia Mons sortie had been harder on Sergei than Helen had anticipated. The actual exploration had been marvelous and they both loved it: the planning and the execution had been exhilarating and physically demanding. It was the long Rover ride that had challenged. She’d not realized how dependent Sergei was on daily vigorous exercise. For herself, she’d managed by employing a yogic technique known as fire breath, and then another biofeedback trick involving imagining her bloodstream as a river, but Sergei had gotten very squirrelly.

  With Yoshi it was a little trickier. She’d thought it was important to him to have personal space, but there were limits to this. Give him just a little, and he was perfectly content. Too much and he became anxious, as had seemed to happen during the Arsia Mons sortie. Of the three of them, he was maybe the best at communal living.

  Helen had only eight more sols to wear Sergei out like a puppy, and grant Yoshi the correct amount of personal space, before they all got back into an even smaller module for an even longer amount of time. This took some juggling.

  “Sergei, how are the greenhouse solars?”

  “Looking a little clogged, Helen.”

  “I’m going to come out and do a good sweep. Would you mind sticking around and helping me out? We should do SA1 and 2 while we’re at it.”

  Sergei does not mind, with alacrity.

  “Yoshi,” Helen continues, “let’s practice the transfer. You can take over the Hab and keep an eye on those drones.”

  Yoshi thinks this is an excellent suggestion. They sign off.

  “GAIA,” says Helen. “Please work on the rye now. I’m going to suit up.”