She will not do this. Difficult never feels as good as you want it to.
Boone Cross says that Eidolon is preparing them all for the unimaginable, which obviously makes no sense, and anyway, Mireille is not convinced that the real event will be the kind of gonzo level of fame and celebration and global attention that Prime is anticipating. In Mireille’s opinion, people in the space industry tended to vastly overestimate their audience. Yes, there were space nerds who had memorized every detail of every mission and would corner Mireille when they knew who she was and space-splain all over her. But there were more people like Yola, from her acting class, who asked Mireille, “Have we landed people on Mars yet?” All during the past two weeks, Mireille had kept the idea of Yola’s cluelessness in her mind as an option to weigh against the This Is a Very Big Deal presentation happening at Prime Space. Because of course you couldn’t help it. You got around these people, and listened to them talk, and saw what they were doing, and pretty soon you too thought that human beings had never done anything finer than space exploration, and no goal was more worthy.
There was something funny about the idea of throwing the plate of food at the wall and jumping up on the table. “Simulate this!” she could shout.
Mireille tells herself to stop drinking at once. It was going to be a long night, and she still needed to be on.
For tonight’s dinner, Prime has let the families seat themselves, and the little tables have filled according to astronaut allegiance. All the entourages are small; Team Helen numbers have fallen. Uncle Francis and Aunt Hillary had taken Gram back to New York once Mireille’s mother had gone into quarantine. Now it was just those odd satellite family members who always showed up for space things, and are Helen superfans and who will go home and continue to be experts on all things space to their friends and are loving it. Weirdly, her mother’s younger brother had shown up yesterday but left this morning. Bitter Phil, Mireille calls him. Thinking of her mother having to swallow a dose of Bitter Phil during the visitation hour makes Mireille feel protective of her mother.
“Well, Meeps, this isn’t as exotic as Kazakhstan, but the food’s a lot better, huh?” says her mother’s cousin’s husband, who is practically humping his chair in delight of being able to toss off this kind of space-industry insight.
Kazakhstan. She’d been fourteen and her father had gotten sick from either the horse meat or the sour milk products and stayed mostly in their hideously ugly hotel while the rest of their family and friends ran around Baikonur like they were participants in a Viking funeral, weeping and drinking and acting crazy. The night before her mother’s launch, she’d wandered down to the fairly disgusting lobby of their hotel and curled up on a horse-hair couch and hoped someone would notice her, until the mother of one of the other cosmonauts found her and put Mireille’s head in her lap and stroked her hair and had said, “I be your mama now, poor girl.”
No, this isn’t like a real launch. All of Prime’s efforts to make things real just proved how unreal it is. Like, they wouldn’t even be in Utah for the real thing, they’d be in south Texas, where Prime launched. Only they couldn’t do Eidolon in south Texas because they needed to be in Utah, where they could isolate the crew and have them run around similar rocks and things for the landing part. And so, before quarantine, Prime had put the crew into an airplane, flown the airplane in a circle or whatever for the amount of time it would actually take to go to Texas, and had her mother and the others wear sim helmets from the airplane to the quarantine facility. Prime had this idea that even things like travel from Utah to Texas could affect the crew’s condition, so they wanted to make it all exact. Except normally, family members would be allowed short visits during the quarantine period. But the fake quarantine facility in Utah isn’t set up for that, like the real one in Texas, and so Prime is sending the family members home tomorrow.
She can’t pretend she’s at a prelaunch dinner. Well, she can, she can pretend anything. She can do dinner theater, ha.
At the table next to hers, a group of Primers are talking about the real launch happening next Wednesday, of Red Dawn II. She hears one of them say, “There’s this great Boone quote—” Space people. She could perfectly play a space person in a movie, although they never sounded or looked in movies like they did in life. In life they were more normal and more weird, but not in movie ways.
Tomorrow Mireille will go back to Los Angeles, as she had always had to go back somewhere after a launch. She wonders if she will feel real letdown after a fake launch. Probably.
She is valuable! That had been a major theme in the past two weeks. How Valuable They Are.
You could see that Yoshihiro’s wife was important to him. You could see Sergei’s kids were important to him. You could see that everybody at Prime felt they were important. God she could just smash this plate. Just pick it up and smash it to smithereens on the table.
It was all so layered. (Okay, she was a little drunk.) Because here they were, having said good-bye to their Loved One for seventeen months. But they were supposed to be pretending that they were saying good-bye to their Loved One for the first human expedition to fucking Mars. But it was still good-bye. They were having emotions that weren’t quite the emotions they would be having. Which sort of robbed them of their current emotions, in a way.