“Guess I’ll never win Best-Dressed Astronaut now,” Helen jokes, pointing to the hole in her pants.
Of course she was embarrassed. She had cost them all time. There were about twenty different things she could have been working on, or helping with. It was a boneheaded mistake, but it wasn’t grave. Frustrating, hardly catastrophic.
Silly, time-consuming error, that’s all.
As the astronauts prepare dinner they joke that one of them will have to try the shower tonight. There is a shower cylinder on Primitus and they are allowed one shower every eight days. Like everything else, it is automated: fifteen seconds of water for wetting, a one-minute pause for lathering, then thirty seconds of water for rinsing. The sensors for the shower are nominal (it is one of the few pieces of automation on Primitus that is working just fine) but nobody has used it yet. They are taking ISS-style sponge baths.
“Yes, you try,” Sergei says to Yoshi. “And if shower does not explode, then Helen will take shower. And if Helen says it is safe, then I will go.”
“Did anyone bring bubble bath?”
“I forgot rubber ducky.”
“Oh good, now I know what to get you for Christmas.”
It’s a moment to learn. This was the thing about miscalculations, errors, mistakes. You admitted them, you used them as teachable moments, and then you moved on. You didn’t forget, but you didn’t dwell.
“I think we should celebrate small successes of today with the orange,” Sergei says.
“It will be good for one more day,” Yoshi says. “Will we enjoy it more tomorrow, when we are rested?”
“Tomorrow could be worse,” says Helen. “Not worse. I mean that we should be in the moment. Right now, the toilet works, and the ETCS”—all three astronauts make the symbol against the evil eye—“is working, and because I have three engineering degrees I was able to successfully plug in the freezer. Let’s celebrate.”
All was okay unless she started compounding error with error. This would only happen if she lost her cool, and she doesn’t lose her cool.
There are potentially a lot of things she has not noticed. She has already lived fifty-three years. Her life could be riddled with cords she hadn’t plugged in.
The last thing you needed at the start of a long and complex mission was self-doubt.
You had to look back, of course you did. You had to recognize the past, and acknowledge it, but you couldn’t stay there. She has a system for dealing with things, and the system has served her well. This is neither the time nor the place to doubt her system. This is the worst possible time and place.
“Ah, we have timed our break well,” Yoshi says. The screen above their dining table is giving them a view of a tiny dot transiting a small blue sphere.
“This has been color corrected,” Sergei says. This must be true. The moon in the image is lighter than it should be.
Helen looks at the Earth and her mind slips sideways again, straight into the lake. She can’t help it and it happens fast.
Her mind slips, and Helen sees her father, lying in a hospital bed, inert but alive. Not trapped in the past, precisely, but preserved in a present with no future. She had never believed that her father would some day “live” in the sense that most people meant, but she had never precisely thought of him as “dead” either. She had seen him move occasionally, an arm, a leg. It hadn’t meant anything. “Involuntary movement” it was called. It had scared her very badly, the first time she saw it. For several months Helen had been afraid to lean over her father and kiss his cheek. He might wrap his hands around her throat. He might stab a pair of stolen scissors into her ribcage. She had forgotten she had this fear.
She must come back, she must. She must get out of this slippage.
“Color corrected, yes, but I am reminding myself that it is still an image worthy of awe.” Yoshi is looking at the screen. “Why shouldn’t we feel awe? In front of a beautiful painting we do not ask ourselves is it real? We know that it is not real. It is a painting. But we can still be filled with awe at its beauty.”
It is the longest thought that did not have to do with technical matters any of them has expressed in twenty days.
Helen thinks that she can’t possibly have once been afraid that her vegetable father would choke her. She is hallucinating. She needs sleep, that is all.
“That’s good thing to remember,” says Sergei.
So this is it, twenty days, that’s her limit? She’s the first of the three to crack? This is what Prime wants to know?
No, she’s back now, definitely. She will not slip again. It’s over.
But the question remains. What else hasn’t she noticed?
“Sleep now,” Sergei says to Helen. He is the commander. “Four hours.”
Helen picks her way through the corridor, straightening a few things as she goes. A great deal of thought has been put into the interior design of their craft. Helen’s sense of decor and adornment doesn’t go too far beyond a fondness for right angles and a vague sense that gray is a nice color on her, but she knows when a thing has been done carefully. That most of the flooring is brown and the ceilings in the private compartments are different hues of blue seems like—when there is time to appreciate such things—something that will be very nice. Also, the Galley table and storage lockers are a snappy red, and the Exercise room has violet matting.
Sergei’s compartment is closest to the Lav, with Yoshi in between Sergei and Helen. She always tries not to notice these things, or give them weight, but a part of her is pleased that the woman was not put closest to the bathroom.