Their landing site had been chosen for safety, not for exciting photo ops. It was the Martian equivalent of aliens coming to Earth and landing in a dusty field in Oklahoma. Elsewhere on Mars there are the volcanoes. The colossal canyon system of Valles Marineris. Dunes, rabens, rifts, clasts, yardangs, sulci, fossae, recurring slope linnae. Here, there are small loose rocks and slightly larger rocks, and rocks in the distance. And dust. It is a good place to land a spacecraft, but you don’t need the seven daily minutes on their schedule to take it all in. Presumably, this will be different when they Gofer. Even a featureless plain will be a marvelous thing when it’s the first time a human has stood on another planet and looked at one, in real time, with their own eyes. Surely, it will be marvelous.
They’d wanted, from the beginning, an awful lot from a cold little carbon dioxide–filled planet with not enough atmospheric pressure to fly a kite and only the puny remnants of a magnetic field. They wanted nothing less than life from this place: evidence of it in the past, and the promise of a place to put it in the future. So many questions they have for this planet. So much work to be done. There will not be enough time in the sol. Even when they Gofer and have five hundred and fifty sols, there will not be enough time.
Helen is responsible for putting these seven minutes on the itinerary. “For the purposes of Eidolon, the time will give us a chance to enter fully into, and habituate ourselves to, the simulation,” she had written. “It might also serve as a daily meditation, which may have a positive effect on mood and performance.”
There were adjustments to be made. A virtual environment in the wild is not the same as one conducted in the lab. Helen is conscious of a life under the sim, aware that she is moving across a real landscape whose perimeters and threats are not known, or stable. It is to be imagined that Prime is taking care of certain possible external threats, which would not exist on Mars but do in a desert in Utah. Animals, for instance. A bobcat landing on her back during an early morning EVA would definitely spoil the illusion. Also, all their tools and instruments are made from light materials: sixty-two percent less than their normal weight. And Prime has appreciated the need to instill a “reason” for the fact that their own bodies could not enjoy some nicely enhanced jumping and leaping: their boots are “weighted.”
The Martian sims were spectacular, of course, enhancing (and obscuring) the section of Utah they were actually walking around, although also slightly altering the appearance of whichever of your crewmates was with you, and such portions of your own spacesuit that you could see. Helen had the sense, for the first few minutes of an EVA, of playing herself in a video game. But then she got used to it, and when she returned to Primitus it was her unaltered self that looked a little fake.
She is conscious that she is using some of her scheduled seven minutes of feelings to remind herself not to have too many feelings. To not think about how a Helen two thousand years ago would have looked at a distant tiny dot in the firmament and not known the first thing about it. To not think of all the hundreds of Helens that had been born and died, not knowing, until we reached a Helen—her!—who would stand on that tiny dot. To not think about all the people who had taken a problem as enormous as putting humans on another planet and broken that down into manageable portions and solved it. To not become lost in the observation of a planet so wondrously—so almost heartbreakingly—close to their own, and yet entirely alien. It’s too soon to think all this.
“I don’t have a sensation of threat or hostility.” This is Yoshi’s voice, in her ear, pleasantly brain adjacent. All three crewmembers cannot be on EVA at once: someone must always remain in Primitus Hab, with RoMeO as backup, for safety. Right now, Sergei is observing Helen and Yoshi via camera from inside the Hab.
“Okay, but don’t take off your helmet,” Helen jokes. It’s true, there’s only so much fear you can talk yourself into. The one moment of true alarm so far on Mars had been that loud cracking noise they’d heard after landing, which they’d never discovered the source of. (Perhaps it really had been a Prime employee falling off a ladder. It might also have been lightning.)
“Spectacular sky,” Helen says, looking up. She is aware that in pointing this out her voice has taken on the mechanical enthusiasm of a mother trying to entertain a child with some everyday fact: “Look! There are three apples and they are red! Oh! That man has on a hat!”
Yoshi points to what, on Earth, would be Venus. A very tiny morning “star” on the horizon.
It is Earth.
Ah. So it will not only be Mars that they will discover for themselves, when they come here. It will be a discovery of distance. An understanding of what the word far can mean.
“Hey there.” It is Sergei now, speaking from the Hab in a terrible cowboy-Western accent. “You two look like you’re not from around these parts.”
They laugh. There are still four minutes left of their morning meditation. In a few sols, she will suggest that they are now adjusted to the sim and have adequate time to reflect on the mission at other points in their schedule, and so they can scrub this exercise. It is a little confusing, maybe.
The astronauts fall silent. It is a good sim. It has depth, it has texture; it feels real. But Helen hopes that the real Mars will surprise them. It’s not impossible. The history of humans looking at Mars is the history of getting it wrong first. Prime, she hopes, has gotten this sim just a little bit wrong.
The anxiety that had plagued her since the beginning of Eidolon—the sense that she had missed something important—has not evaporated. If anything, the sensation has only increased. She’s missing something now on Mars. Looking for something.
“I’m trying to think of right soundtrack for Mars,” Sergei says.
“Not bells,” Yoshi says.
“No.”
“How interesting.” Yoshi again. “One hears certain music described as ‘otherworldly,’ but when you are on the otherworld, nothing is sufficiently strange.”
What will they talk about when this is no longer a simulation? Will they look at Mars and say, “Yep, just like the sim”? If it looks like this, they will never be able to say, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” She should not feel too much now, so she can feel more, later.
YOSHI