There, his irritation with Helen has passed. He cannot blame her for laughing. There is something silly about the three of them crammed in like this. He doesn’t want to do play acting about his near death. He wants real danger. Not danger. Opportunity. He is an explorer. He does not mind being shut into a tube for days if he is actually going someplace. Anyway, nothing ever feels like what you might think it will feel like. Not sex, not death.
Sergei has had three good friends die, several acquaintances, older colleagues, his grandparents, and his father. At the moment of his father’s death, Sergei had been in another room, sealing a box of books. His mother had asked him to do this. The packing tape he had been using had been some cheap brand, with a poorly designed dispensing mechanism, and Sergei had been mightily annoyed with how the tape was failing to roll off in one thick strip, but was splitting vertically, which meant it had to be picked at, and tape was being wasted. His father was the kind of man who would buy the cheapest tape as if it were a virtuous act, and then judge any complaint of it to be a failure of virility. His father had said once: “I would cut off his balls if he had any” about some person who had failed him in some way. It didn’t sound threatening, the way he said it. It sounded disgusting. It made Sergei think of his father handling another person’s balls, pulling them down before slicing them off.
His mother had been in the room with his father at the moment of his death, with Sergei’s sister Valentina. Valechka came to the doorway and said, “It is over” to Sergei, and he had not—if he were very truthful—instantly left off being annoyed about the tape. He’d still been irritated when he embraced Valechka and looked at his dead father.
In the end, just a skinny little man in a bed, revealed like a wet dog to be nothing very much at all. Not that it had taken death for Sergei to realize this. The joke about his father was that even as a tyrant or an asshole, he was sort of a failure.
Helen has stopped her noises.
“It’s not nervous laughter,” she explains. “I was thinking of what I might say to my daughter and, for some reason, I got a little silly.”
“You don’t have to do it,” Sergei says. “You don’t have to make the message.”
Yoshi says nothing. Sergei can see that Yoshi wants to laugh at Helen but is not because he can see that Sergei is annoyed, and this is also annoying. Helen holds up her screen.
“Meeps, I just want to say that I love you very much. Please know that I love you very much and I want you to have a happy life.” She presses the screen to her chest, erupting into another round of the evil laughing. “That was awful,” she says, between grunts. “Those were the worst last words ever.”
Yoshi holds his screen up to his face and makes a strangled cry. It is something like a person screaming, only screaming in a whisper. He shakes his head while he does it, and goggles his eyes like a Maori tribesman. Helen starts laughing, properly now. Huh-huh-huh.
“Let’s try again,” she says, holding up her screen. Yoshi joins her and they both pretend to be screaming in terror, before collapsing into more absurd giggles.
Sergei considers crawling up the ladder, just to get away from them.
There is, he knows, a camera in the tube. Someone in Prime is watching them. He would like to draw Helen’s attention to this.
“It is possible a last message under these conditions is not such a good idea,” Sergei says. Helen and Yoshi quiet down and he sees Helen almost imperceptibly glance at where he knows the tube camera to be.
“Possibly not,” Helen says. “Well, enough silliness. I’m happy to go out with flames of glory and the rest is silence.” Sergei is glad he only hated Helen briefly. Helen is excellent.
“Let us take our positions,” he says.
Sergei climbs down to the lowest part of the tube: unfolds a ladder rung to make a chair. Helen does the same just above him, and Yoshi arranges himself above Helen.
The three watch the levels of their radiation exposure rise. Even as a sim, this is alarming. Sergei pictures himself strapped to a board while thousands of knives are thrown at his body. What are the odds that the knife thrower will miss? Especially when the knife thrower has no feeling for him, no reason not to kill him right now? Well. Not right now.
Probably his crew should not sit in contemplative silence right now.
“Helen.” Sergei looks up at her dangling legs. “Are you making progress with the language for landing speech?”
“I think Prime is going to ask people like the US Poet Laureate to make suggestions,” Helen says. “The whole thing makes you appreciate how great ‘One small step’ was. It’s tough to get importance and meaning into one sentence without being too flowery or poetical. Or stiff.”
Earth is just a disk on their screens now. Mars is bigger; they are more than halfway there, thank God. He’s getting as moody as a woman. Sergei cautions himself against anticipating wild liberty during the Mars Simulation. He will step outside only technically: his spacesuit is only another kind of craft. He will not feel the wind on his face, he will not see the sky as it is. And certainly he will not be able—as he has in his dreams—to dive into a lake, an activity that in the past week has come to symbolize the zenith in physical pleasure. Both Yoshi and Helen have said that they dream of hot baths, but for Sergei it is a cool lake, not too cool. He’s had a few fantasies of sneaking off on “Mars” and opening the faceplate of his helmet, drinking in some nice Utah air. Fresh and cool, but not too cool. Of course he will do nothing of the kind.
“The occasion will make whatever you say remarkable,” Yoshi says. “The phrase does not have to be remarkable in itself.”
“Although it is an opportunity,” Sergei points out. “You can inspire people.”