You missed it,” Luke says. “Yoshi started screaming at Sergei after Sergei gave away the ending to Doctor Zhivago. And then Helen started crying and went to the bathroom and gave herself bangs.”
“Ha ha.” Nari thunks herself down in the chair next to Luke and holds out a plate of cookies. “The party is raging in Mission Control. People are doing traditional wassail and there’s a snow machine.”
On the screens in front of them, the astronauts are cleaning up after their special Christmas feast and will go to bed soon. It is almost midnight, Primitus time.
Four in the afternoon, Earth time. Luke is struggling. His circadian rhythms look like a Jackson Pollock painting. It affects them all a little differently, and Luke—to his shame—is sensitive.
He’s also been up for eighteen hours, working for sixteen of them. Since today was a free day for the astronauts—no training, no sims—it was a full day for observing social and recreation time. Two members of the Obber team drew Christmas vacation, so they’re down to four. Luke and Nari have spent the day watching the most hypnotically boring reality channel on Earth.
It was a joke among the Obbers. “You can’t look away,” they said. “It’s mesmerizingly dull. It’s Chekhov in space.”
According to the astronauts, the astronauts were fine! They were happy as tinned clams. They answered every question, filled out every questionnaire, filed every personal report with monotonous cheer. No, they were not stressed. Yes, they felt engaged. No, there were no conflicts. Yes, they were sleeping. They liked the food. Their health was good. They missed their families at entirely appropriate levels that were absolutely manageable. Occasionally, an astronaut would submit thoughtful ideas on small modifications to their situation or equipment. Sergei would be brief and cheerful in his punctuation selection; Yoshi was exquisitely polite; Helen sent them under the heading: Things to Think About.
According to the face and voice scanners, the astronauts were not always fine, but the Obbers were still struggling to read these. The astronauts switched languages a lot in casual conversation, and their facial expressions changed according to language, as did the pitch and tone of their voices. Additionally, they sometimes spoke to one another while engaged in another task, and might be reacting to the task, or the person. They chatted for hours about technical things Luke could barely follow.
Aristotle had written that it was easy to become angry—the difficulty was in being angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way. Put like that, it seemed not just difficult but impossible.
It was not difficult for the astronauts.
Helen only expressed anger toward herself, but did not appear to dwell on it. Yoshi allowed himself to express anger at current events, but he always did a meditation after looking at the news uplinks, and that was that. Sergei pretended to be angry for comic effect or as an anger scapegoat for the crew and otherwise waited until he was no longer angry to express anger.
There were days when Luke was angry with the astronauts for being so perfect, even as he admired them, loved them, really. Right now, Sergei and Helen are cleaning the dishes and Yoshi is vacuuming the floor around the Galley table. Sergei begins to sing “Silent Night.” He has a good singing voice.
For about three weeks the Obbers were able to observe the same social niceties as the astronauts: courteousness, mindful speaking, respectful consideration of possible cultural differences. Because of their training, and—more powerfully—the constant exemplars of good behavior they observe every day, they have not devolved into outright rudeness or in-fighting, but Luke is aware of crests and troughs of group cohesion. There was this gap: the crew had been chosen in part because of their ability to handle certain kinds of stress, but the members of Mission Control, and even the Obber team, had been chosen for other skills. Yet Mission Control and the Obbers shared certain strains of the same kind of stress.
“All for one,” Sergei says on the screen. The astronauts stand in a circle and make a stack of their fists. “One for all,” they say, breaking apart. This is nearly the only time they touch each other. They do not hug or kiss cheeks. Sometimes Sergei will put a hand on Yoshi’s shoulder, and sometimes Yoshi does the same to him. No one touches Helen.
• • •
“SLEEP WELL,” Helen says. “Thank you for a wonderful Christmas.” The holiday was “hers,” as she is the only native Christmas-er. New Year’s will be Japanese-style, for Yoshi, and Sergei will be hosting a Russian “Old New Year,” on the fourteenth.
Luke sighs. He’d miscalculated his caffeine intake and he’d drunk too much champagne during his break. He’s not going to be able to go straight to bed.
Nari says she’s going to catch the shuttle back to the dorms. Luke puts on his running shoes. Prime keeps a clean road between campus and dormitories even in this weather. Luke tries to clear his mind and just run, the way the astronauts could seemingly just do things.
But he is not an astronaut.
Helen hadn’t shown to her best advantage in the Christmas video. Sergei was naturally very funny, and Yoshi was endearingly game for anything. Helen had a wonderful sense of humor—sly and dry—but she didn’t do goofy as well as the others. Helen was performing slightly better in the sims than either of her crewmates: fewer mistakes, especially in the eleventh-hour range, where both Sergei and Yoshi tended to rush. And yet, she was no machine. She was creative. She’d made those slippers for Yoshi and another pair for Sergei’s Christmas present, and for Yoshi she’d assembled a sound recording of celestial magnetic fields: Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the comet 67P. Her harmonica playing was excellent. But Luke is aware that she does not inspire the same affection in people as Sergei and Yoshi do. He’d thought that the female Obbers would be protective of Helen, but if anything they were slightly more critical. Unpacking exactly why Helen didn’t engender sympathy was possibly a window into inherent sexism, but possibly something else.
It was amazing that Helen was able to have such healthy relationships with men, considering that her father had been in a vegetative state for the entirety of Helen’s adolescence. By all accounts, Helen’s marriage had been happy, although her husband had been considerably older. No surprise there.
Luke wonders if Helen has ever had to rebuff a male colleague’s romantic overtures. (She is on record for answering “never” to the question of sexual harassment.) In all the conversations Luke has been privy to, he has never heard anyone voice concern over Sergei or Yoshi forming a limerent attachment to Helen, or Helen to either of her crewmates. He wonders whether Helen has checked any signs of this in herself, in word or deed, and he’s missed it because he can’t read her properly yet. Perhaps she has wanted to place a hand on Sergei’s back, to express natural human affection, and has not. (She never has.) Perhaps she would have liked to let her eyes linger on Yoshi’s bare torso while he exercised, to allow herself a moment of sensual appreciation, but did not. (She did not.) Perhaps she thought about it later, when her eyes were closed, and the computers weren’t able to scan for lust.
Ransom had put out a jar in their office. Every time someone asked them if astronauts ever had sex in space, they were supposed to put in a penny. Luke had wondered if, by the end of the mission, they would have enough to buy the whole Obber team a beer. “By the time the mission is completed,” Ransom said, “we should have enough to buy an island.”
On a certain level, it was both good and necessary that Helen was not more obviously lovable. Sergei and Yoshi had found the perfect buffer for both Helen’s femaleness and her strength. They had made her a superwoman, not subject to the laws of mortals and, by extension, its vulnerabilities. Helen did not seem to resent this, or feel it a burden. Luke had no way of knowing how deep that went. He—the person who saw all—was shut out. Whatever the astronauts felt about one another, they didn’t say it.
“Early days, still,” Ransom said.
Things would get harder. Mars would present technical challenges. And then there was the biggie: the voyage home. If Primitus pushed the limits of acceptable space per person, then Red Dawn—even smaller—would be even more confining; their time inside it would be almost two months longer. And the excitement of the Mars landing would be behind them.
The astronauts’ success in Primitus was no guarantee for Red Dawn: adaptation was extremely situational.
They all knew what they were looking for. Crew preoccupation with their environment, noncompliance with schedules or requests communicated from Mission Control, antagonism to external evaluation, prioritization of personal comfort over mission objective. Exacerbation of cultural and language differences, variability in crew cohesion, improper use of leadership roles. These would manifest as lapses of attention, sleep disturbances, psychosomatic illness, emotional lability, irritability, loss of vigor and motivation.
So far, nothing.
This was good, of course.
At least they were throwing out those ridiculous FIRO-B questionnaires and evaluations. Perhaps they could begin to think of what might be the right questions to ask these people. None of the astronauts had availed themselves of the opportunity to use their computer therapists, no surprise, but none of the family had either, which was disappointing. Mireille Kane was the only one who consistently filled out the weekly questionnaire—it was optional—but she went only as far as circling or checking options; she never volunteered feedback.
Back at the dormitories, Luke makes his way to his room. Some of the Prime engineers had made Christmas displays: elaborately outfitted snow globes suspended from the ceiling and cued to music. They twirled and played when you got close to them. Luke loved the people at Prime for stuff like this. For air hockey battles between Team Trace Toxic Contaminants and Team Nutrient Stability, for naming their pets after mathematicians, for getting upset with the town’s holiday banner on the department store, a concession to multiculturalism that read Peace on earth, which was a fine statement, but the earth had been written with a small e and “If we’re going to capitalize the names of nations, the names of corporations, people’s names, then we have to capitalize Earth!” A special-ops team had been organized and deployed to change the sign at night.
Luke enters his pod room, a little messy now because of the gifts he’d opened from his family early this morning but not put away. He’d talked to his family on screen today while the crew was exercising. The whole gang had put on the Prime Space T-shirts he sent. They were proud of him. His father, especially. It’s not nothing, to make your father proud.
“You’re going to be a part of history,” his father said.
It was a Sergei phrase: “It’s not nothing.” All the astronauts used it. All the Obbers used it now too. They had their own T-shirts with it printed. Prime Space: It’s Not Nothing.
Luke settles into his bed, thinks of the crew settling into their own beds. He wraps his arms around his body. He spends so much time looking at Sergei and Yoshi and Helen that it’s not always possible to get their images out of his head.
Perhaps Sergei and Yoshi would like to touch Helen. Perhaps she wants to be touched.