You have to find another level. Just now, on Primitus, it was like being the parent of a toddler. A hundred tantrum-y toddlers. And, like a parent, maybe you had to forgo a full night’s sleep, and eat standing up, and not exercise, and let the house be messy and not return emails or have recreation hour. You had to, because these were potentially lethal toddlers and they would not scream themselves out or nap. Helen crouches down beside the freezer, then kneels. Her calves are cramping.
They absolutely could be bombarded with these kinds of problems in the first twenty days of a mission to Mars. They could be bombarded with these kinds of problems for all one hundred and eighty days to Mars. The problems could be much, much worse. They could have all died on the launch pad. Not that Prime would have run that particular sim for Eidolon, but they could certainly keep this level of potential crisis up for their entire trip, and Sergei and Yoshi and Helen would have to find a way to manage it. That was the deal with space. Whatever happened, you had to manage it, or you would die. And when you started to become upset, you had to find another level.
You have to find another level. Helen had said that to Meeps, when she was a toddler and having a tantrum. The problem with Mireille, then as now, was that she never truly wanted to find another level. She wanted people to come to her level and . . . do something, tell her that it was okay to feel whatever she was feeling, but clearly it wasn’t okay, because her feelings made her miserable. Helen rolls back from her knees into a crouching position and leans forward to stretch her calves. The knee of her left pant leg rips.
These pants are meant to last Helen another week. Like the food packaging on board, Prime’s patented Solox clothing material is engineered for radiation defense and biodegradability, but it performs best as clothing when it is not subjected to twenty days of nearly continuous crawling, crouching, and kneeling. Helen has a more favorable opinion of the Solox bra she is wearing. The padding for extra protection creates—when she is working on her back—a kind of shelf out of her boobs, a useful tool rack from her rack.
This is a joke she could make, but will not.
To meditate, she needs to shut her eyes, and if she shuts her eyes, she might fall asleep.
It was perfectly possible that many of the problems on Primitus were real problems. They were sitting in the middle of a desert inside a highly automated craft, and everything, everywhere, breaks. It was conceivable that Mission Control was going nuts right now, replotting their daily schedule of planned sim disasters in order to figure out how to keep Primitus going for real.
Or every single problem was a simulated problem being stage-managed by Prime as part of their training, a test of their capabilities, a program with the objective of monitoring what conditions will result in performance degradation.
The cacophony most unpleasant ceases and Helen feels a blast of cool air from the vent above her. She lifts her face and opens her mouth as if to drink it.
Sergei appears in the doorway of the room where Helen is crouched. The fabric of Sergei’s Solox T-shirt is dark with sweat and he emits a powerful odor. Helen can also smell herself. She thinks that Sergei smells like an animal and she smells like a vegetable. Maybe Yoshi smells like a mineral.
“You find thing?” Sergei asks. His English is degrading.
“Not yet. I’m working through it. I’m loving this air, though.”
Yoshi appears over Sergei’s shoulder. Mineral! She was right. Or perhaps she is imagining it. In fact, they all smell pretty bad.
“Good news,” Yoshi says. His English is becoming, if anything, slightly over-enunciated; his wide mouth curves over the words. He reports that the sensor warning lights on the solar panels was a problem of the sensor warning lights, and not the panels.
“Okay,” Sergei says. “We should eat a little. And, Helen, your rotation is up. You must sleep soon.”
Helen stands. She is embarrassed at the sound of crunching cartilage in her knees, and so speaks over it, a little more loudly than is necessary. She has been working on the freezer, she sees now, for two hours.
“I’m okay for another hour. Help me get this upright?” Helen asks.
“Pfft.” Sergei joins her. “Did you find my caviar?”
As they shift the freezer, an unattached cable swishes out from the bottom like the tail of a mouse.
“Oh,” says Helen.
She squats down. Her knees creak and the rip in her pant leg widens.
She missed this cable. She missed it.
It is an absurd mistake. Step one: make sure everything is plugged in. It’s so absurd a mistake that she cannot quite believe she made it. It’s so absurd a mistake that her body breaks out into a cold sweat and her hands begin to shake.
Now she is aware of being observed.
Helen scoots around until she finds the cable’s mate and attaches it. The freezer emits a smug hum. Not smug. A freezer is not capable of smugness.
“Maladets,” says Sergei. Helen looks at him and then at Yoshi, who gives her a congratulatory peace sign.
“No, I didn’t do anything.” Helen must admit her error. Her throat has gone dry. “I mean, I missed that. What I mean is, I think it just took me two hours to realize that it wasn’t plugged in.”
Helen looks at Yoshi, looks at Sergei. They look at her, they look at each other, they look back at her.
“Pttsk,” says Sergei, finally. “That is not so bad as three things I have done. Come eat.”
“I will put the supplies back in,” Yoshi says, waving at the freezer.
They all make mistakes. Occasionally an error makes the news, as when an astronaut failed to correctly tether her tool bag during a space walk and had to watch all one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of equipment float away from her. “Astronaut Loses Purse in Space” had been the headline. Oh, they all make mistakes, and if you were a woman you took it harder because you knew others would, but everyone took it hard. Most of the time, even if you felt that you hadn’t made a mistake, you still sought criticism. Tell me what I did wrong. Tell me how I can improve. What was a better choice I could have made?