You missed it,” Luke says. “Yoshi started screaming at Sergei after Sergei gave away the ending to Doctor Zhivago. And then Helen started crying and went to the bathroom and gave herself bangs.”
“Ha ha.” Nari thunks herself down in the chair next to Luke and holds out a plate of cookies. “The party is raging in Mission Control. People are doing traditional wassail and there’s a snow machine.”
On the screens in front of them, the astronauts are cleaning up after their special Christmas feast and will go to bed soon. It is almost midnight, Primitus time.
Four in the afternoon, Earth time. Luke is struggling. His circadian rhythms look like a Jackson Pollock painting. It affects them all a little differently, and Luke—to his shame—is sensitive.
He’s also been up for eighteen hours, working for sixteen of them. Since today was a free day for the astronauts—no training, no sims—it was a full day for observing social and recreation time. Two members of the Obber team drew Christmas vacation, so they’re down to four. Luke and Nari have spent the day watching the most hypnotically boring reality channel on Earth.
It was a joke among the Obbers. “You can’t look away,” they said. “It’s mesmerizingly dull. It’s Chekhov in space.”
According to the astronauts, the astronauts were fine! They were happy as tinned clams. They answered every question, filled out every questionnaire, filed every personal report with monotonous cheer. No, they were not stressed. Yes, they felt engaged. No, there were no conflicts. Yes, they were sleeping. They liked the food. Their health was good. They missed their families at entirely appropriate levels that were absolutely manageable. Occasionally, an astronaut would submit thoughtful ideas on small modifications to their situation or equipment. Sergei would be brief and cheerful in his punctuation selection; Yoshi was exquisitely polite; Helen sent them under the heading: Things to Think About.
According to the face and voice scanners, the astronauts were not always fine, but the Obbers were still struggling to read these. The astronauts switched languages a lot in casual conversation, and their facial expressions changed according to language, as did the pitch and tone of their voices. Additionally, they sometimes spoke to one another while engaged in another task, and might be reacting to the task, or the person. They chatted for hours about technical things Luke could barely follow.
Aristotle had written that it was easy to become angry—the difficulty was in being angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way. Put like that, it seemed not just difficult but impossible.
It was not difficult for the astronauts.
Helen only expressed anger toward herself, but did not appear to dwell on it. Yoshi allowed himself to express anger at current events, but he always did a meditation after looking at the news uplinks, and that was that. Sergei pretended to be angry for comic effect or as an anger scapegoat for the crew and otherwise waited until he was no longer angry to express anger.
There were days when Luke was angry with the astronauts for being so perfect, even as he admired them, loved them, really. Right now, Sergei and Helen are cleaning the dishes and Yoshi is vacuuming the floor around the Galley table. Sergei begins to sing “Silent Night.” He has a good singing voice.
For about three weeks the Obbers were able to observe the same social niceties as the astronauts: courteousness, mindful speaking, respectful consideration of possible cultural differences. Because of their training, and—more powerfully—the constant exemplars of good behavior they observe every day, they have not devolved into outright rudeness or in-fighting, but Luke is aware of crests and troughs of group cohesion. There was this gap: the crew had been chosen in part because of their ability to handle certain kinds of stress, but the members of Mission Control, and even the Obber team, had been chosen for other skills. Yet Mission Control and the Obbers shared certain strains of the same kind of stress.
“All for one,” Sergei says on the screen. The astronauts stand in a circle and make a stack of their fists. “One for all,” they say, breaking apart. This is nearly the only time they touch each other. They do not hug or kiss cheeks. Sometimes Sergei will put a hand on Yoshi’s shoulder, and sometimes Yoshi does the same to him. No one touches Helen.
? ? ?
“SLEEP WELL,” Helen says. “Thank you for a wonderful Christmas.” The holiday was “hers,” as she is the only native Christmas-er. New Year’s will be Japanese-style, for Yoshi, and Sergei will be hosting a Russian “Old New Year,” on the fourteenth.
Luke sighs. He’d miscalculated his caffeine intake and he’d drunk too much champagne during his break. He’s not going to be able to go straight to bed.
Nari says she’s going to catch the shuttle back to the dorms. Luke puts on his running shoes. Prime keeps a clean road between campus and dormitories even in this weather. Luke tries to clear his mind and just run, the way the astronauts could seemingly just do things.