“Right.” Helen folds her arms across her chest, perhaps in unconscious response to the rising rem levels. You couldn’t blame her. Sergei half wanted to shield his balls. “Prime wants something along the lines of ‘I take this step for all the people of planet Earth,’ but they think it would be nice to get in the word ‘peace’ and also ‘hope.’ You can’t please everyone, but they’re trying to find something of maximal inoffensiveness.”
“Animal lovers could be upset if you say ‘for all the people.’” Sergei shifts on his seat. He would like to grab Helen’s ankle. Not out of desire, just contact. “You are human exceptionalist,” he tells Helen. “You should take one small step also for bunny rabbit and opossum.”
“Who will be thrilled to know the humans are thinking of moving,” Helen agrees.
“Also, maybe by the time we go, some people will have stopped identifying as people and will want to be acknowledged as something else.”
“One giant leap for sentience?” Yoshi calls down.
“I had this thought the other day,” Helen says. “Since we can’t all egress at the same time, that we’d sort of take turns going in and out, and make our statement once we’ve all stood on Mars.”
“But then it’s not so much like we are the best and bravest explorers in the history of humankind,” Sergei says. “And more like we’re members of a trapeze act.”
It is true they cannot egress all together. There must always be one person in Primitus, for safety, until the moment when they make the transfer to Red Dawn.
“But this is a nice idea,” Sergei says.
“It will be a moment for all of us,” Yoshi says. “But yours will be the voice of the first human presence on another planet. As Sergei says, it is an opportunity.”
Yes. This is the thing to keep thinking of. The opportunity that will be real.
Much of his job was waiting. If waiting was a difficulty, that meant he was not doing his job well.
There was a kind of strength that was not truly strength, though it was often mistaken for it. That kind of strength meant you could run fast to the top of the mountain, but it wasn’t because you had endurance, it was because you had—above all else—a desire to be done with the thing. It was not remarkable to have this kind of false strength: muscle and will, merely.
He must be the person who can not only die in space, but also sit in a tube in Utah and live.
To explore was also to wait. To wait for wind to blow, for ice to thaw, for night to fall, for day to come.
“Okay,” Sergei says, looking at the screen. “We are still alive.”
DMITRI
DECEMBER
Dear Papa, Dmitri writes. He stops. He has only twenty minutes to write this email before the train arrives at Penn Station. His father likes it when Dmitri shows him how fluent he is getting in English, but Dmitri can’t write an email in English in twenty minutes without making mistakes. He would like to get it done, though, so he can enjoy his time in the city in his own way. Ilya will be occupied for the afternoon: he has ballet class and then rehearsals for The Nutcracker. Dmitri is supposed to sit in the hallway of Ilya’s school and do homework while Ilya does his thing, but Dmitri doesn’t do this anymore, or rarely.
He tells Ilya that he goes to the coffee place to do his homework or walks around Union Square. Sometimes he does these things. Ilya has no problems with Dmitri not sitting in the hallway. Ilya keeps his mouth shut because he prefers that it be Dmitri who is in charge on Saturdays. If it wasn’t Dmitri, then it would be their mother, and she always wants to watch Ilya dance through the window, which makes Ilya almost insane with fury. Ilya has gotten emotional about his dancing. He is always saying that he dances like shit, or that he had a shit class. He doesn’t want to be contradicted on this point. Ilya is the only sincerely self-critical person Dmitri knows and so when Ilya says “I danced like shit in class today,” what Dmitri largely feels is pride in his brother, mixed with a bit of envy.
Dear Papa,
We will be in school when the Chinese land on the moon. We will watch this in school. The parents have to give a consent to the watching, because maybe an accident will happen, and some people might have psychological damage from watching. In America, anything that makes you sad is called a trigger because of all the guns, I am thinking, and this is why they want a lot of places to be a “safe space.” My maths teacher does not know very much about science but likes to talk about trivia. For example he says that the Apollo astronauts reported that the moon smells like burnt gunpowder, which I guess is a thing every American knows the smell of. I remembered that you smelled space when you were in the airlock on the space station because of particles from things like solar wind and also space debris would collect on the spacesuits after a spacewalk, and you said that space smelled a little bit like meat. I suppose the smell can be explained as a result of highly activated dust particles with dangling and unsatisfied bonds.
Dmitri pauses after this flurry of typing to review an explanation of dangling bonds on his screen, to see if he has it correctly, and if dangling bonds are something different from unsatisfied bonds, or maybe all dangling bonds are unsatisfied? Dmitri is taking chemistry this year, which he does very well at, even though it gives him no particular joy. His school has some good classes, but the students all seem to be insane: the girls too friendly in a fake way, the boys ineffectively violent and emotional. It does not help that the rest of his family has taken to their new life: Ilya and his dance school and his girlfriend, his mother and her circle of Russian friends and Gyro-yoga classes and having a husband who comes home every night. Even the cat they got to replace Slutskiya is considered by everyone to be an improvement.
Ilya sniffs loudly, lifts his leg like he’s going to fart on Dmitri, and keeps on playing the new game Prime sent. Dmitri switches to typing in Russian so he can get the writing over with.