Everyone receives the news of catastrophe in their own way. The Chinese are already beyond their tears. It was always like that, with the dead.
“Terrible,” Sergei says. This is their crew-only link, although of course it’s not just them listening to it. “At first,” he says, “I thought it was not real. I thought it was simulation.”
“I did as well,” Yoshi says. “It’s perhaps too awful to believe.”
“This is a hard moment,” Helen says. She is commander; she must direct her crew. “This is rough. Perhaps we should take a moment of silence? For the crew of Weilai 3, for their families, for everyone at CNSA?”
As Helen says this, she cannot escape the idea of various members of the Prime staff being quite close. Not just in rooms of the Space Center campus, but standing right outside the walls of their craft, looking and listening. There is something grotesque about taking a moment of respectful silence for astronauts who have died while rocketing to space while Helen and her crew sit inside a simulator pretending to be heroes. Tragedy is always grotesque.
They cannot bow their heads, because of their helmets. Helen closes her eyes.
She has a system already in place for things like this. She takes a moment to let her consciousness comprehend the event—repeating to herself the sentence Weilai 3 suffered a catastrophic failure, killing the entire crew: Yu Chen, Meifeng Guo, He Liu, and Mingli Sheng. As she says the names, she pictures the faces. These people here, she instructs herself, are people who were once alive, and now they are dead. She finds she can take it in. The knowledge, the sadness, is another layer to the atmosphere of her own particular planet, already thickly coated. This, she lives with.
The next thing she would normally do is ask herself what steps she could take: was there an action that might alleviate suffering the event had caused, such as a donation of time or money? Was there a public or private statement she could make that would be meaningful? Once that was accomplished, it was mostly a matter of being aware of how the event might have affected others, being quick to spot and react to these affects.
Keep busy: such a commonplace piece of advice, but the best one. Death, pain, loss, grief. These were as fundamental to life as the elements on the periodic table. You didn’t ask, “Why, God, why?” about the periodic table. Sometimes a new element got discovered. You added it. You got on with it.
She must think about her crew. It was now her crew. What would her crew need? The natural response in these situations was to want information. Dr. Ransom had said that details were slow to come, so presumably everyone was starved of access in that way, but her crew might feel their isolation very strongly. Their isolation is real.
For as long as she’d been an astronaut she’d heard that psychologists were concerned that losing sight of the Earth might cause some kind of ultra-homesickness, even breakdown. Helen had never thought this was likely. Watching Earth “recede” had been interesting, not devastating. Crew cohesion had been maintained without conflict. Helen would not characterize any of her states of mind as depression. It had been a nuisance that she had been repeatedly plagued by bouts of anxiety and strange memories during the voyage out, like contracting a persistent case of eczema or blepharospasm, but it wasn’t significant; it had not affected her work. Helen was conscientious about using the Reaction Self-Tests, and she remained in top form. The only one inconvenienced by her mood was herself, and she could manage herself. In a way it was good that her “trouble” had occurred so early in the mission. Prime was using a mission-concurrent psychological state baseline. The face and voice sensors were less likely to be tipped off to changes in her demeanor since her demeanor had been consistently a little off since day twenty. And she’d prepared. Helen looked forward to the time when she could tell Meeps that those questions Helen had asked her, and Meeps’s answers, had foiled technology.
“You have to smile with your eyes. If you have a smile on your face while you’re talking, whatever you are saying will sound warm and happy, even if the listener can’t see your face. Posture is always a dead giveaway—the body doesn’t lie. I like to imagine my whole face lifting up by an inch. Crossed arms looks defensive, one hand on a hip looks confident. Mom, sometimes you do kind of a singsong cheery voice, and that might get on people’s nerves.”
As for the rest, well, Helen could read data too. For seven months, she’d not wavered significantly in levels of neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, or conscientiousness. She’d not shown signs of asthenia, no weakness of nervous system, no blood pressure instability. She’d been worried about sleep, but she’d slept just fine: averaging 6.44 hours per night. She’d looked forward to sleeping, in a funny way that was new to her. Almost as if she might get a message or clue about this persistent sensation of having missed something important, but no.
A terrible thing has happened.
It was a commonplace: We are made of star stuff, and to star stuff we will return. That the Chinese astronauts will go to space, perhaps even the Moon, is a nice way to think about it. Helen returns to absorbing the news of the tragedy.