“Ho-ho!” Sergei shouts.
Helen is strapped to her seat, immobile, but the protocol list fastened to her wrist has opened upward and is rustling its laminated leaves. The pages are fluttering gently, lazily.
In her peripheral vision, just to the right: a gear bag is floating on its tether, tilting vertically, glissading toward her until its tether becomes taut, and then gently, almost shyly, retreating. A cable just below it rises like a languorous snake.
It is funny. Helen could almost swear her internal organs are rising up within her body, that the straps holding her to her seat are straining. Her body is getting tricked. Her body is mirroring what it sees and since her body believes, her brain has no choice but to follow along. Mind under matter. It is delightful. So real. She is weightless.
Helen wishes she could release herself from her seat, release even just an arm, but then is glad she cannot. The spectacular illusion would be shattered. The bag is not floating, and neither is she. A phrase rises in her mind, she can’t trace back its context.
Nothing feels as free as this.
Oh yes, the Playtex ad on the wall in Japan. The lady in her bra and girdle. Look how far women have come.
The game designers at Prime Space were little Gods indeed. Probably God would look more like a computer programmer than an Old Testament guy, anyway. Prime is in the details.
The string holding up the little green man in his spacesuit has gone slack. The alien floats, content, peaceful, in his element once again. On his way home.
LUKE
The astronauts stand before a window that is not a window. Obviously, the astronauts can’t have a true functioning window in the desert when they are supposed to be in space, but the actual Primitus has no window either. A space-worthy window is heavy and compromises the defense of solar radiation for the craft. It is a concern, the loss of a window, for the health of the astronauts. Looking out the window is the thing that astronauts love the most, their favorite occupation, the thing they say never gets old. Photographing Earth is the number-one recreational activity. It is meditation, it is reward.
It has been explained to Luke that the view on the way to Mars “will be crap, anyway, mostly.” The crew will be flying in sunlit blackness. For a decent look at the cosmos, they will need something better than their eyes and a window. They will have it: exterior cameras on Primitus will transmit real-time feed of what is outside their craft to screens throughout the interior of the Habitat. The cameras are fitted with enhanced spectral range lenses: infrared and near ultraviolet, and will be a vast improvement over the crew’s own eyes. The astronauts will be given first their own planet, their own moon, and after that, Deep Space objects. At the other end of the journey, they will be given the moons of Mars, Phobos (fear), and Deimos (dread). They will be given Mars. Better than their eyes, better than a window, realer than real.
? ? ?
JUST NOW, the astronauts are speaking from prepared statements. The sentiments they express work equally well for both a real and simulated mission.
“We are at the beginning of a long journey of discovery.” (Helen)
“It is a great privilege to play a role in this remarkable endeavor.” (Yoshihiro)
“To my family, I wish to say that I will be thinking of you every day.” (Sergei)
? ? ?
THE OBBER LAB is also windowless: one long wall a bank of screens, the other a digital whiteboard. In between these walls, there are stand-up desks and sit-down desks and foot rollers and exercise balls. Above the bank of screens, Ransom has strung a bannerlike poster with the words No Reality Without Observation, which is a quote from Niels Bohr and, as Ransom explained, technically bad science but fitting for their mandate.
Luke thinks that it will be very difficult to measure on Eidolon whether the loss of a real window is a significant psychological factor or not. On Eidolon, the astronauts will know they are looking at images Prime has prepared, not real-time feed. This is the elephant in the analogue room of Eidolon: they cannot tell what anyone will feel about the true experience of going to Mars until it actually happens, and there has to be a possibility that the feeling will significantly alter every aspect of the mission. Everything about Eidolon is set to diminish this probability, but they can’t take it to zero.
The clock has officially started on Eidolon. It’s a clock like no other, neither quite the twenty-four-hour day of Earth, nor quite the twenty-four-hour, thirty-nine-minute, and thirty-five-second sol of Mars. This clock moves in Primitus time: an ongoing calibration that will—when the astronauts land—have the crew adjusted to the Martian diurnal rhythms, and synchronized with the landing target’s time zone for minimal jetlag. Right now, the difference between real Earth and Primitus time is a matter of extra seconds in the day, and so far none of the Obbers are feeling the effects, but this will change. The crew will have the advantage over Mission Control and Obbers, since all the interior lights on Primitus will be adjusting to give them the semblance of a day and night, glowing blue or red as needed to help slowly shift the body’s stubborn circadian sense of order. (And helped by the fact that none of the crew are naturally extreme early risers, a trait that makes such a shift doubly difficult.) Mission Control and Obbers will be working in shifts, and also doing things like going outside, without sim helmets. They have drugs, and special sleep masks, and even goggles they can use when they’re outside, but things are likely to get a little hairy.