YOSHI

This is a tuba concerto by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams,” Yoshi says. “Long Kwan is the soloist, in a live performance with the Hong Kong Baptist University Symphony Orchestra.”

Prime uploads a music performance every morning. When they Gofer, this will be part of a worldwide music participation program: Music in Space! Right now, someone in Prime is making selections. Yesterday they had a Sufi song. Sufis twirled in ecstasy when they danced, or perhaps the ecstasy of being a Sufi caused them to twirl. There wasn’t much room in Red Dawn for twirling, or for ecstasy either. Helen had bounced around in her chair a little.

They must all continue to be very normal, very nominal. They are doing, Yoshi thinks, a good job. They are acting as if Sergei had not introduced a note of paranoia. No, it was more an orchestra of paranoia. Helen is doing the best job. Perhaps she is not concerned. Yoshi wants to talk to her, very badly.

They are in a sort of trap. To ask Helen to join him in the Lav without Sergei for a soundless confabulation would be a clear indication—to Sergei and to Prime—that there is an issue of some significance. Prime already knows—probably—that there is an issue of some significance. They might have deliberately fabricated the issue to test their responses. Double blinds within double blinds were structurally possible.

There is also a world where Sergei is perfectly fine, and a private discussion is unnecessary.

Yoshi pretends to listen to the music, but there is not enough tuba in the world to sort this out.

They have plenty of time now; this exacerbates the problem. Red Dawn is a kind of incubator, and so they must be very cautious about what they allow to grow. You need words—banalities are best—to neutralize the danger. There isn’t enough space for words in Red Dawn either. Not these words.

They’ve all been trained to recognize the symptoms of paranoia. They are in perfect conditions for its occurrence, more at risk for it than almost anything else.

At first Yoshi thought it was a prank of some kind. Sergei said, “The odor and bacterial filters need to be repositioned,” and since this was not a sentence that made sense, it seemed that Sergei was pulling them all into the Lav under obvious false pretenses. Yoshi had been a little impatient because it was their first recreation hour since launching from Mars and he wanted to enjoy the views.

It was difficult to fit all three of them into the Red Dawn Lav, which was even smaller than the Lav on Primitus. It had no shower—sponge baths only for almost nine months—and the three of them crammed together were required to stand nearly nose to nose, with Sergei straddling the commode, Helen jammed against the lockers and cleansing towel dispensers, and Yoshi wedged in between fan separators and Chute nozzles.

Sergei had brought in a whiteboard and handed out markers. Then he wrote:

LOST SIM DURING DUST DEVIL ON SOL 23
TOTAL SIM FAILURE

SAW REAL LOCATION

Yoshi’s impulse had been to stop him immediately. It wasn’t that the part of his brain that endlessly reverse engineered Prime special effects had gone quiet. He enjoyed imagining how Prime had managed to accomplish this or that, and assumed they all did. They are engineers; it was their poetry to understand these things. But Yoshi was also comfortable with the artificial. Perhaps because of this, he had lost his bearings once or twice, and forgotten the differences between things. The balance was delicate, and needed to be maintained.

And then Sergei had added the sentence:

WAS NOT UTAH—WE WERE NOT IN UTAH

While Sergei continued writing, Yoshi had deliberately avoided looking at Helen. Even a single exchanged glance was too much to risk until they knew exactly what they were dealing with. Yoshi thought about Sergei’s increased conservatism regarding safety protocols during their last sols on Mars, his lack of chatter, the bouts of staring. Helen would have noticed too, though Yoshi was not aware of any countermeasure she had taken. He’d thought that Sergei might be getting a mild case of what they called, in Antarctica, the “bug eye.” Yoshi had felt guilty. He’d been too taken up with his own private ruminations; he should have been more attentive to other people’s subcurrents. And Helen had become too happy. This was why joy was not a particularly desirable emotion on a mission. Joy made you notice less. Or do less with what you did notice.

As did desire.

NO LANDMARKS OF UTAH SITE < NO INDICATIONS OF AN OFFICIAL SITE < NO CAMERAS < WE WERE ALONE

DIFFERENCES IN COLORS < PERSPECTIVES

NO WARP TO VIEW OF SELF OR HELEN

PHOBOS IN ANNULAR ECLIPSE

PHOBOS

The fluid nature of their leadership roles often made being the commander more titular than anything else, but Yoshi did feel—in the Lav—that this was a situation where he must lead. One good technique was to perform a verbal repetition of something that was said to you, and in this way you could communicate both your desire to understand precisely what was being said, give your crewmate an opportunity to correct or refine his point, and—if necessary—allow him to hear for himself how whatever he just said was ridiculous. Some caution needed to be exercised in employing this method. It was not helpful to be mocking or sarcastic. Yoshi must respond with caution. He also needed to write his response, and since Yoshi was left-handed and prohibited from repositioning himself due to the fan separators between himself and Sergei, he had to scrawl.

Sergei had been in the Lav for forty-five minutes that morning. Yoshi had assumed diarrhea, but now realized Sergei was probably checking the wedge for cameras. Prime was contractually obligated not to put cameras in the Lav, but Sergei would not have trusted that. He would have checked for audio, but audio was easier to conceal. Sergei’s use of the whiteboard meant he was taking no chances. They would have to come up with some explanation for Prime about this secret, silent meeting. They could brazen it out, but that was a risk.

Yoshi had taken Sergei through a summary of what Sergei had seen, and then Yoshi erased it and wrote POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS on the whiteboard. Then he’d gotten tangled up in a micro-g-condition urinal funnel that became detached from the wall, so Helen took over.

WAS NOT TOTAL SIM FAILURE, she’d written. YOUR SCREEN HAD GLITCH. LOADED ALTERNATE MARS SITE.

Yoshi, having freed himself, tapped her explanation with his marker in agreement and added:

PRIME DUST DEVIL SIM V. COMPLICATED, NOT SURPRISED AT GLITCH

And then, after making a fresh bullet point:

SIM SWITCHING CAUSE OF VISUAL DISORIENTATION, V. NATURAL

Sergei had written:

ALSO POSS THAT PRIME WANTS TO MAKE ME BELIEVE > THIS IS TEST > WILL I TELL YOU > BUT I HAVE

Sergei had not finished the thought. He scrubbed the whiteboard clean and ended the meeting by exiting the Lav. Yoshi had received one look from Helen, which he’d been unable to decipher. He thought his lexicon for Helen’s expressions was complete, but he had been wrong.

A blip, a glitch, a momentary lapse of reason.

At some point, for an unspecified amount of time, Sergei thought they’d actually gone to Mars. At the very least, Sergei might now be spending quite a bit of time trying to convince himself that this was not in the realm of absurdity, that he was not insane to entertain the notion.

It was not helpful—for Sergei—that Prime has them following the mission architecture for what a return after thirty days would really be. They had always planned to train this way, but Sergei could easily fold this into his paranoia.

Yoshi has accepted the possibility that Sergei wasn’t disoriented, that he’d really seen what he claimed to have seen, but believes that this was something Prime had deliberately done, like the tampering with Sergei’s equipment, like eppur si muove on Primitus. Prime wanted real data. Not astronauts pretending, astronauts believing. Dangerous, this, but understandable.

Yoshi badly wanted to talk with Helen. Only he was rather afraid that instead of talking about Sergei, something else might come out of his mouth.

The tuba concerto is over. They must now record their reaction. The astronauts applaud.

“Thank you very much, Long Kwan and the Hong Kong Baptist University Symphony Orchestra,” says Yoshi, “for that beautiful performance. On behalf of the crew of Red Dawn, I salute your skill and dedication. We were so grateful to be your audience in space today.”

There is nothing to do but keep going. They have a schedule.

If Prime had made the voyage out as dynamic as possible, with weeks of calamity or near calamity, their time now is marked by a shift into automated regularity. Were the astronauts capable of setting and maintaining a busy self-guided schedule when there was no immediate cause for them to do anything? Yes, of course they were. Everyone knew that if they were not busy, they would become unhappy and not perform well.

They might give in to paranoia.

So they will maintain their Hab and keep their skills sharp by training in sims. They will conduct such scientific experiments as the limited space for equipment allows. They will exercise, maintain their craft, and engage in public discourse and educational outreach concerning their mission.

“The tuba is a more dynamic instrument than I’ve appreciated,” Yoshi says.

“I’ve heard that being a professional tuba player is extremely competitive, much more so than other instruments,” Helen says. “In an orchestra, you might have thirty violinists. But there’s only one tuba. And it’s a very loud instrument, and you’re the only one playing it, so it’s very obvious if you make a mistake.”

“Yes, a mistake would be very obvious,” Sergei says. The words come slowly out of his mouth.

Yoshi doesn’t look at Helen. He cannot remember how often he gazed at her, before the dust devil moment, or how often he looked at Sergei, before he took them to the Lav and confessed he was delusional. He would have looked them both in the eyes whenever he addressed them, at least some of the time. And there would’ve been just general looking, in the way one did. Yoshi doesn’t want to seem to be looking at either one of them less or more. They will notice. Prime will notice.

“Time for haircuts!” Yoshi says, and they move from the Galley/Recreation wedge, where they’ve been listening to music, to the Science/Lab wedge. They are not getting haircuts. They are removing five strands of hair from each of their scalps with tweezers. The roots will be analyzed for gene expression change. It is a useful and easy way to look at the effect of cosmic radiation on their bodies, stress levels, and metabolic conditions, particularly good on Red Dawn because it requires no equipment other than tweezers, a storage box the size of a toothbrush holder, a small portion of their single freezer, and RoMeO.

“But I do need a haircut,” Helen says as Sergei dons medical gloves. Helen is starting many sentences lately with the word but, an indicator that her listeners are joining in late to some sort of internal monologue or debate. It is driving Yoshi mad.

No, he is quite fine.

“We all need a haircut.” Sergei’s movements are not erratic, not distracted. He moves with the deliberate pace that all of them practice in Red Dawn, where it is easy to bang an elbow. The walls are a pale silver and this and the curves—especially in their small sleeping pods set above storage spaces—create a slight illusion of more space than actually exists.

It is true, about the haircuts, at least in his case. Sergei’s wheat-blond hair grows downward, into a neat cap, but Yoshi’s hair goes vertical until the weight brings it down, and the vertical stage is a little too comical. The situation on Red Dawn is already teetering toward farce.

“I should have shaved my head when you two did,” Helen says.

Sergei removes five strands of Helen’s hair at the roots, performs the same service for Yoshi, then hands Yoshi the tweezers. For a paranoiac, Sergei seems perfectly content to offer up his nucleic acids. Yoshi must not exclude the possibility that Yoshi is the one suffering from paranoia, or that he has fed from Sergei’s. Whatever happens to one astronaut can easily happen to the rest. They are at risk for contamination—paranoia is psychologically communicable—and Red Dawn is too small to dedicate any location for crew isolation.

“I want to shave my head,” Helen says.

“Chuhh,” says Sergei. “Okay.”

“I’m serious,” Helen says. “That’s the kind of haircut I am requesting. It will be so much easier. I don’t want to dry shampoo for seven months. It’s silly that I didn’t do it before.”

Helen wants to shave her head? Where in Helen was this desire located, what was its source, what did she see when she saw herself bereft of hair?

“Okay,” Sergei says. “Will be best if we cut short, and then use the vacuum shaver.”

“When would you like to put it on the schedule?” Yoshi asks, because he must not betray any consternation. Yoshi has a vision of the kind of Victorian lockets containing the hair of the beloved. He had thought of asking Madoka once if she would contribute a lock to a locket, for him to take with him to space. She would have done it. What had stopped him? Perhaps knowing that things like lockets with hair in them were very fine in literature but should not be attempted in real life, lest they fail to live up to literature.

“We could do it now,” Helen says. “And move the Venus Probe Sims back a half hour? It shouldn’t take long. Just hack and buzz!”

“Changing the schedule on the fly is Prime recommended,” Yoshi says. It is true. They must not become too dependent on routine—it puts them at risk for torpidity, which rather seems the least of their worries at this point.

“How do we classify Helen’s hair for disposal?” Sergei folds his arms and looks at Yoshi. “This is much more hair than what comes off our heads. It is nonrecoverable cargo, yes, but of what label? Nonbiodegradable waste? It is possible that it was contaminated on Mars and we should mark it for destruction.”

He is making a joke, although trash is an incredibly serious topic on Red Dawn. On the space station they can use a Prime Raptor for trash, which is jettisoned prior to reentry and disintegrates, along with its contents, when it hits Earth’s atmosphere. But they will be returning to Earth with all their waste materials.

“Perhaps we can keep it in the Lab,” Helen says, with a smile. “Maybe some hair product company would like to give us a million dollars to do a study on the effect of UV radiation on labile proteins? I can’t think of another use for it. I don’t think my hair is going to be of much value against solar flare.”

“It could make nice pillow,” Sergei says.

“Or a sweater. I forgot to pack my knitting needles, though.”

“Can you use my chopsticks?” Yoshi joins in the joking just in the nick of time.

They do haircuts in the Lav. Sergei volunteers to play barber and Yoshi remains in the doorway to video the event and in order to give Sergei more room. Also, because he is horrified. Helen faces the wall and straddles the closed lid of the commode. She pulls off the hair band holding her ponytail together and fluffs out her brown and gray curls. They look so soft.

“My father would cut our hair when we were children.” Sergei hands Helen a trash bag to hold. “My sisters and me. We had to make a line and take turns in a chair in the kitchen. I remember he would put a bib around our necks, to catch the hair. Very scratchy yellow plastic, I hated this. But I learned how to cut hair from watching him cut Galina’s and Valechka’s, and I cut my own boys’ hair.”

“You don’t have to make this nice,” Helen points out. “Since we’ll just be shaving the rest off.”

“Maybe you will like just short hair, not bald,” Sergei says. “Bald is extreme. And you might have egg-shaped head. You must consider what Yoshi and I will have to look at.”

Yoshi has no words. Sergei is patting Helen’s head, separating clumps of curls. He asks for and receives a comb. And Helen’s eyes keep closing whenever Sergei tugs the hair back from her scalp. For nearly eight months Yoshi had nothing in his lexicon for Helen’s sensuality, and now he has the way she touched her bare skin on Mars, and this, this giving over to someone else’s, not his, touch.

Problems, these are all problems. They were all behaving differently. They could not pretend that they weren’t, or Prime would be curious about what they were concealing. They must find a way to be transparent and opaque.

Maybe this was what Helen was doing. She never looked at herself, but Prime was looking all the time. She would give them something to look at so she could retreat deeper into whatever had happened to her. (What had happened to her?) She would empower Sergei as her Delilah.

He’d not experienced the dust devil in the way that Helen and Sergei had. Had Prime deliberately kept him out of it? Had Prime manufactured a scenario in which Yoshi would see Helen nearly naked? Why is he the commander now; what specific skill does he have for any of these scenarios? This was Junya with his hand pressed over Yoshi’s eyes all over again. Yoshi can only command himself, to wait, to endure.

He must not forget himself, or let his crew forget themselves. There is too much time, too much space. They must remember their names, their countries, their languages, their sexes, their bodies. They must remember where they are, where they came from, where they are going. He can feel the pull, the allure, of forgetting. It is the pull of space itself and they are explorers and they will always go to the edge of the map. But he cannot yet, he is not ready yet, he has only just begun to open his eyes.

He knows he must think of his wife. Only, somewhere on Mars, he lost the power to imagine her.