So many things in life just happen, without the sensation that you are crashing repeatedly with great speed into a brick and steel wall, accompanied by a roaring noise. Your father slips and falls and hits his head, your daughter grows up, your husband dies in a parking lot: these are quiet events, so unbelievably quiet, you could miss them if you weren’t standing right there or had your eyes closed. You did miss them, sometimes. No matter how violent and terrible.
Maybe your husband never loved you, maybe your daughter will never comprehend your love. Maybe you have always been alone like Michael Collins, with something between you and the Earth. These are things a person needs to be helmeted for, strapped down into a custom molded seat, medicated against nausea, called a hero for enduring. But these are the things that you will walk upright with, must wear with no more ceremony than you would a sweater.
Did she stand on Mars? Can she stand on Earth and hold her daughter?
It’s all she wants to do, right now. That’s why she is afraid.
Also, Helen is afraid because she knows that after she holds her daughter, she is probably going to want to do this all again, want it just as much as she ever has.
They are stabilizing now, the upper atmosphere catching them. Helen can rotate her head inside her helmet just enough to see a window screen. The view at one hundred fifty thousand meters above the Earth in a spacecraft is very old-timey hell: sparking flames and evil-looking vapors. It is getting warmer now. She can feel the sweat on her body. Gravity.
This landing will not be the same as the other times. She will not have the sensation of her spine, having lengthened over two inches in the course of weightless months, crunching back down. She will not feel like someone is sitting on top of her head. She will not, two days after landing, finish writing a note to herself and then put the pen in the air where she expected it to stay and be surprised by it dropping to the floor, of all places. Her body has changed, oh yes, but not from gravity.
Six thousand meters above the Earth now, everything is going very well. The screen is black, and then this blackness melts away and is replaced by blue.
The blue is sky. Their own blue sky. Sweetly blue, perfectly, wondrously, uniquely blue. Earth.
Before, after you landed, a hatch was opened and arms reached in to pull you out and it was a kind of mad cacophony, an onslaught of colors and smells and voices and things. And you were very sick and your body hurt and you wanted to lie down in a quiet, dark, still place, and shut your eyes. But now, it will not be this way. Not only because you will be perfectly able to stand on your own, but because now you are essentially a Martian who has come to Earth.
But the Earth beneath your feet will be the real Earth, and the sky above you will be the real sky, and the daughter or the son or the wife you hold in your arms will be your real daughter or son or wife. And for a moment those arms will be the only place it matters to have gone. For a moment. Because then you will lift your head to the heavens, as humans have always done, as they must. And you will wonder.
The love that brings you back to Earth is not the same love that makes you want to leave this Earth, it is not the same love, no, but it is no less a love. It is love too, that makes you lift your head and wonder.
But oh, for now, this sky, so sweetly blue, so perfectly, wondrously, uniquely blue. Nothing in the universe is this blue sky, this home, this place where the people you love are waiting for you, and you are not alone, and you will save this Earth, and be rescued on this Earth and from this Earth, and you will take to the skies once more, and nothing feels as free as this, and this feels real, it really does.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel was inspired by a newspaper account I came across in 2011, outlining a long-duration isolation study meant to mimic a 520-day mission to Mars. Mars500 was conducted at the Institute for Biomedical Problems, in Moscow, with a partnership between Roscosmos and the European Space Agency. The six-member international crew from Russia, Europe, and China began the simulated mission inside a specially constructed module on June 3, 2010, completing it successfully on November 4, 2011.