“But it wasn’t staggering,” Yoshi persists. “Your body, and ours, did exactly what might happen if the speed of our rotation was disrupted.”
“It’s not nothing,” Sergei says, leaning over to look at Helen’s calculations. “If Prime can create the sensation of acceleration on a stationary platform. It seems a lot of effort just to see who vomits. Or to get picture of Yoshi in underwear for astronaut calendar.”
“I’m more interested in the how,” Helen says.
“Eppur si muove.”
Helen and Sergei look at him.
It is a beautiful thing, when understanding comes. Among other things, it makes you realize that your subconscious operates continually, not like a ghost in your machine, but like the parts of your program that are kept hidden just so the central console won’t be too cluttered. Not only has Yoshi understood what just happened, but he has understood why. He and his crew, they have forgotten that things are not entirely in their control, and this was Prime’s way of reminding them. On their way to Mars there may—there will, surely—be things they cannot account for. Prime is reminding the astronauts—moving so smoothly, so confidently in their imaginary craft—that they don’t know everything, will never know everything. Was not this entire mission a test of faith?
“Galileo’s supposed last words.” Yoshi points to the floor. “We’re not on a stationary platform.”
The astronauts look down at their feet.
“Eppur si muove,” Yoshi says. “And yet it moves.” Galileo’s supposed last words.
Primitus was not sitting in the desert in Utah; it was on another structure, which was capable of doing things. They were not stationary. The whole thing—the spacecraft—was alive, was active.
Prime was Junya’s hand over his eyes, testing his endurance, making him prove that he belonged here, that he was one of them. Prime is swinging the bat in front of their faces. But he is no longer a child, he can take this and much more. Prime has done something, perhaps more than they intended. They have revealed himself to himself. How will the crew behave when they encounter a mystery?
More, he addresses Junya. More, he says to Mission Control. More, he demands of space itself. Do more. I am not afraid.
LUKE
When Mireille appears on screen, she is sobbing. Luke waits, occasionally saying, “take your time” and “it’s okay.”
It is not okay. The Chinese astronauts are dead, all of them. They did not reach the moon. A fire in the cockpit killed the crew eighty-one seconds after launch. Nobody knows exactly what happened. The Chinese launch from a remote and closely guarded location in Inner Mongolia; the craft and the remains of its occupants were brought down in the Sea of Japan. They were being recovered now.
Mireille’s face is jammy from tears and makeup. She cries openly, not covering her mouth.
Luke is not the one who is supposed to talk to Mireille, who normally communicates with Kyrah, the liaison assigned to handle Helen’s family members. But Kyrah is having an emergency root canal, Dr. Ransom is in a meeting with Boone Cross, and Mireille needed to be contacted.
“I don’t know,” Mireille says. “I don’t know why I’m so . . .”
All over the world, people are expressing their grief and solidarity with the Chinese, even though almost nobody, except the Chinese, truly wanted the Chinese to land on the moon. Nobody wanted this, a horrible explosion, deaths, but probably not a few people would be consoled by the thought that, for a little bit longer, they could look at the moon in the night sky and not have to imagine people drilling for Helium-3 on it. Luke might have felt something like that himself, before he came to work at Prime. Before, he would not have imagined the bodies. Would not have imagined the devastation of the people at the Chinese space agency, their sense of responsibility, their guilt.
At Prime, there is absolutely no time to even comprehend the event in China. Red Dawn II is about to land on Mars. Prime is putting another craft on a planet where most of the things that are sent to it crash. This needs to happen successfully or there is a chance this crew will not be the ones that go to Mars. This crew, that is now in areocentric orbit of Mars, and six hours ago was given the go-ahead to begin the Entry, Descent, and Landing Simulation. Four hours ago, Weilai 3 blew up.
“It’s that awful thing,” Mireille says, “that awful video that someone took secretly and is everywhere and you can see the flash in the sky and the person holding the camera going, ‘Oh,’ and you can’t actually see anything and it’s worse, almost, than if it were some graphic thing, it’s like, we don’t even know, like it’s not even real.”
Luke has seen this footage, not official, terrible in what it wasn’t showing, what had to be imagined.
Luke is nervous. He has observed Helen reading and viewing messages from Mireille. He’s reviewed both sides of their correspondence and looked at Kyrah’s reports and summaries. He has come to think of Helen’s daughter mostly as a possible source of tension or stress: a person Helen will miss, worry about, could be hurt by. And now this person is nakedly, more than nakedly, skeletally distressed, in front of him. He isn’t trained for this.
“I want to talk to my mom,” Mireille says.
Luke nods his head.
“No, I really want to talk to my mom.”
“I know it’s very hard,” Luke says, “not to be able to communicate right now, but—”
“Do not tell me what is hard.” Mireille stands up and moves out of frame for a moment, knocking her screen downward. Luke can see part of her kitchen floor, the bottom edge of a stove, a pair of high heels, one shoe on its side. The screen jerks upward and his entire visual field is nothing but green fabric curved from some part of Mireille’s anatomy and then her face, quite close-up.