At the bottom of the stairs was a photograph Yoshi had taken from the space station, at night. He said that they had been over central Asia at the time, but in the picture you couldn’t see that, or Earth at all, just a narrow curving beam of the Earth’s atmosphere, and behind that, a setting crescent moon. He had talked about how he could take a picture of the Earth that captured what he was seeing, but never one that captured how he felt about what he was seeing. He said that this photograph didn’t capture his feelings either, but it was the photograph that most closely reminded him of his feelings.
If Yoshi were here right now, she would tell him that of course a photograph couldn’t capture his feelings. He was always reading books, and listening to music, and looking at photographs, like that photograph of her great-great-grandmother, and wanting to see things in them, and find things in them. What was he looking for? Why go to space at all? One could stand on a staircase and go where no one has ever gone. Why go to Mars? People would go to Mars and what? Destroy it, and make a bunch of art.
No wonder her great-great-grandmother had closed her eyes in the photograph. They should all close their eyes. The Earth was coming for them. The Earth was going to reach up and grab them and not let go and they would have no choice but to stand still, and submit to the fire.
LUKE
The Eidolon Observation team—Obbers—has a meeting in X-4, but Luke is early. His colleague Nari is also early, so the two decide to go up on the roof and take in the view. Luke is glad that Nari is his partner for so many shift rotations, as she has a very good sense of humor. Today, she’s wearing glasses with grooved frames and thick lenses, almost like binoculars.
Nari takes the stairs two at a time. Like many of the structures here at the space center, the stairs are made of recycled steel and coated in a shiny color of something Luke suspects is not paint. He thinks the reds and blues and yellows are the effect of whatever treatment is on the Low-E windows. The primary colors always make him feel like he is in a Legoland version of a space center, but in a good way. Prime probably intends him to feel this way: they are a very thorough organization. At the company dormitory in nearby Hornsville, where the Eidolon teams are housed, almost anything a person uses, touches, consumes, or handles is tagged for either recycling or composting. His podlike bed is a thing of ergonomic beauty and is giving him the best sleep of his life. Luke can sign up for lectures on astronomy or robotics or planetary geology given daily in one of the communal spaces. He can spend an hour floating in the sensory deprivation tank. He can join air hockey or basketball teams with names like “Lagrangian Liberation Front” or “Phobos Phalcons.” Prime is, in short, heaven. Secular heaven.
And Luke will be spending the next couple of years observing three of the best examples of Homo sapiens, and maybe making some contribution to helping Earth’s best humans take off from a moving object and fly more than fifty million miles across space to another moving object, and land, and stand where no human has stood. When Luke had seen the mission control room of Prime Space, he’d almost burst into tears. And when he made a humorous kind of comment about his emotion at communal dinner, everyone murmured some kind of “yeah” and “me too.”
They reach the top of the staircase. Nari half turns and body slams herself with accuracy against the metal door, which swings open.
Before them, to the north, the majestic outlines of the San Rafael Swell. The swell is a result of plate quivering in the Paleocene, somewhere between forty and sixty million years ago, a time of mountain building known as the Laramide Orogeny. Luke knows very little about geology, but is struck by the sensuality of the language, so different from that of cognitive science. The Laramide Orogeny sounds to him like the secret parts of a woman, perhaps a woman from Wyoming, passionately arrived at, like the swell, through a long series of pulses and quivers and persistent thrustings in the dark.
To look at now, the swell is austere and harshly alien. Which makes it a reasonable analogue for the Mars portion of Eidolon. Tucked into a valley among the mountains are the simulators the astronauts will be using: the exact models of Primitus, the craft that will take the crew to Mars, and Red Dawn, the one that will bring them home, plus two Rovers and supply pods, and the processing plant. The site is closed to everyone but a special Eidolon team, affectionately known around Prime as “The Shadows.” Luke has seen mockups of the spaceships around the space center. He cannot quite believe they are real. That is, that something exactly like them is real. He has also been to Hangar A at Prime’s launch center in Texas. They hadn’t let him inside to see the heavy-lift Manus V rocket—the real one—that will shoot Primitus to Mars, but just the size of the hangar caused a primitive animal response in his body: the hair on his arms and neck had stood on end. Afterward, on the flight from Texas to Utah, he’d become incensed by the behavior of his fellow passengers, unable to bear the cognitive distance between human beings who could dream and then make a Manus V, and human beings who selfishly crammed an extra bag into the overhead compartment.
Nari joins Luke at the roof’s perimeter wall and points out a few landscape features. She takes a deep breath and tilts her face to the sun, holding her hands over the lenses of her glasses, then brings her head down and blinks through her glasses at Luke in a friendly way.
“You have a favorite astronaut yet?” she jokes.
“Oh cool, we get to have favorites,” Luke jokes back. In truth, he has noted in himself a special preference for Helen Kane.
“Yoshi is sort of the perfect man.” Nari fiddles with her spectacles. “He’s a pilot, he’s got degrees in aerospace engineering. He plays the piano. He was a star baseball player in high school. He’s an environmental activist. He’s like”—she makes her voice exaggeratedly teenager-ish—“evvvvverything.”