For the question What is the word or image that you most associate with the word human? all three had said: explorer.
Which only revealed that Sergei and Yoshi and Helen were all very good at answering questions designed to reveal their personalities without revealing anything useful about their personalities. They were canny or artful in similar ways, which was potentially more useful than self-disclosure.
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AT THE OBBER TABLE, the talk now turns to Red Dawn II, whose launch date is set for the very day the crew will be simulating launch in Utah. Boone Cross has said that he will not send a crew to Mars without having two Earth Return Vehicles already there: there must be a ride home, and a backup ride, both fully fueled and waiting for the astronauts, or Primitus will not go.
Nobody is allowed to say the words crash or explosion within a ten-kilometer radius of Prime Space. Suggested alternatives are: RUSE (Rapid Unplanned Separation Event) and learning experience.
As for what will happen to Eidolon if Red Dawn II suffers a launch pad learning experience in two weeks, that will be very tricky indeed. A crew that knows its real launch date will need to be pushed back, and may be in jeopardy altogether, will not be a happy crew. It’s a tense time.
Along with launch windows for Mars, there are launch windows for this particular crew. Helen is fifty-three now, will be fifty-seven for the real thing. A two-year delay, maybe a four-year delay, was all she, and by extension the rest of her crew, can afford. Their self-designed Eidolon mission patches have an emblem of three crossed swords: they are Musketeers for Mars, all for one and one for all.
The Obber team leader, Barkley Ransom, is now proposing a toast. It will be a challenging seventeen months for their group: no downtime except for shift changes, and their bodies and brains will be pushed to the limit of endurance. “But remember,” Ransom says, “what Boone always tells us: ‘If you don’t start every day in awe of what we’re doing here, then you don’t understand what we’re doing here.’”
HELEN
Does it feel real?
Helen knows that she needs to stop asking herself this. It is not a meaningful question.
Everything is real in some sense. Unicorn is a real word.
A simulation of reality still exists in time and space and, if you are inside it, has a blood pressure, a heart rate, a nervous system, all the usual suspects. You don’t stop being a real person just because you aren’t in a real place.
Helen knows what the real thing feels like, and what it feels like to be tested for her physical and mental responses to a simulation of the real thing. There is a difference between the two, although it’s not always as great as people might think. Helen has not felt fear of death in a simulator, but she never felt fear of death riding a rocket, either. In both cases, what she feared was screwing up.
That doesn’t mean Helen is cavalier about death. She respects death. But she fears failure.
Still, she was aware—riding a rocket—that she could die. Awareness of imminent possible death is not without beneficial properties. Risk of annihilation can be a key ingredient, like baking soda. A teaspoon or so is sufficient to make all the other components rise up in glory, but without it? No cake. For some, the edge of death is the only place to find love of life. And having once felt this event horizon and yet escaped, they must return again and again, testing, testing. For these people, alive is not alive. Almost dead is the only alive.
This is not Helen. She even drives her car at the speed limit.
But not today.
There are many things that can go wrong in the first minutes of leaving Earth and most of them come with a decision-making window of less than five seconds. If you are an astronaut it means that you are someone who can assess and react quickly. If you are a great astronaut it means that while your mental and physical reactions operate at top speed, your emotional reactions are stately and glacial. The combination that works best is someone who only needs four seconds to get to: This is what we need to do, and four months to get to: Gee, I’m a little bit uncomfortable.
Helen is a spectacular astronaut.
Does it feel real?
Well, it doesn’t feel like nothing, that’s for sure. There is a mighty shaking going on and an invisible gorilla is sitting on Helen’s chest. She’s felt this gorilla before, it’s an old friend. You can’t shift the gorilla, you just have to endure it.
Helen’s physical autonomy is diminished to the limited degree with which she can tense or relax her muscles. She can also move her eyes, and with those she can see her hands, her knees, part of Yoshi’s arm, and, for split seconds, a toy alien above Sergei’s head.
The alien is having a hard time. He is on a string, not strapped in, and appears to be doing an alien version of the St. Vitus dance. Someone in Prime has humorously outfitted the little green man with his own aqua blue Prime Space spacesuit, complete with Prime Space insignia.