From the other end of the table, Sergei, who is tinkering with a glove, makes one of his expressions of annoyance. “Chuh,” he says. “This is fucked.” Prime has been putting Sergei through a number of suit and monitor malfunction simulations.
Yoshi judges the temperature of Sergei’s “This is fucked” to be mild, and that Sergei does not expect any response from them, or an offer of assistance. Annoyance and adversity are their entertainment on Mars; the servicing, fixing, and adjustments of their own equipment have comprised most of their labors. In a few days, Sergei and Helen will undertake the main exploratory event of their Mars stay: the Arsia Mons sortie. Yoshi will remain behind in the Hab and begin processing the samples collected from the drilling site. This is a wise division of labor, considering skill sets, and Yoshi will make a later Rover expedition with Sergei, to deploy the drones. He will get his chance to explore. And really, he was very content to be in a situation like this one: snug in the Hab with Helen and Sergei, each of them working. Yoshi does not ask for much, he merely wants to be where he should be, where he belongs, which is something you can know by orienting yourself to what is around you, and making yourself a part of it.
Yoshi reads through another paragraph of the Prime script:
A thing to consider: we are used to thinking of planets and moons as quite perfect spheres, but they are not. Our beautiful Earth is not a marble, it’s an oblate spheroid, bulging out around the equator and squashed a little flat at the poles. Mars is quite bulge-y around its middle. The great Tharsis ridge near the equator exaggerates this. Tiny and low Phobos and Deimos orbit very near the plane of the equator, and a Martian who has always lived in the upper north or lower south of the planet would never see the moons!
Yoshi looks at Helen, working across the table from him on her own screen, almost certainly designing tomorrow’s schedule. It is an aesthetic pleasure to look at Helen’s timetables.
Difficult to describe Helen, even after seven months. More difficult after seven months. Yoshi has never spent so many consecutive days in the presence of a woman. Well, his mother, during his childhood, but that was different. Yoshi has been married for eight years, but it is unusual for them to be in the same place for two or three months without some interruption.
Helen straightens her shoulders and sits back, an indication that it is probably okay to interrupt her.
“Helen, was this script written for you?” Yoshi asks. “I have just read this word: bulge-y.”
“It was,” Helen says. “But I’ve noticed that talking about satellites brings out the poet in you and I thought you’d give it more flair. Feel free to make the text your own. How about instead of bulge-y, you say . . .” She pauses and then, with mock seriousness and an imitation of Yoshi’s British-inflected accent, “Excessively protuberant.”
“Ha. Yes. Good,” Sergei says.
“Excessively protuberant.” Yoshi pretends to type this in and then mimics his own accent. “Right-o. Jolly good. Tickety-boo.”
Helen flexes and closes her hands, rolls her shoulders. “Okay. We should get the last uplink from Ground in ten minutes, but I don’t anticipate any changes. Most of tomorrow is about prepping Rover I for Arsia Mons.”
“Ah, we decided about ‘tomorrow,’ then?” Yoshi asks.
“Lots of people like ‘sol-morrow’ and there’s a strong advocacy for ‘nextersol.’” Helen smiles. “But nobody thinks that ‘tosol’ is going to catch on.”
“Unless you speak English,” Sergei points out, “all those options will sound equally foreign.”
“MarsNOW could be the opportunity,” Yoshi says, “to correct some language mistakes. We could stop using ‘sunset’ and ‘sunrise,’ and substitute words that indicate the planet’s revolution. It is humans that have phases, not the moon.”
“You know”—Helen tilts her head—“I’m not sure I ever learned the Japanese for ‘Phobos’ and ‘Deimos.’”
“‘Fobosu’ and ‘Deimosu.’”
“Oh. Right.”
“We could use MarsNOW to get the United States on metric system,” says Sergei. “That would be a big step.”
“No kidding,” says Helen. “I like that the ‘Astronomy on Mars’ script has us calling our moon by the name Luna. That’s less Earth-centric. We’re not the only ones with a moon.”
There is a moment when they all try to think of something more to say, and then the moment passes.
Helen breaks open a chocolate bar. All of them are experiencing a craving for sweet things. They are burning more calories, but Sergei has posited that it might also have something to do with the dust. Everyone takes a square.
“We have enough for s’mores on the camping trip? It’s a long time in the car,” Sergei jokes.
Yoshi tells himself that it will be nice to have the Hab to himself for a while. He had been quite a solitary child—his parents were busy and active. He remembers his mother, writing out the family schedule in the morning. Sometimes it was a dilemma: “Where will Yoshihiro be? Yoshi needs somewhere to be.” And there had been the moves: from Japan to Berlin, then London, then back to Japan. His own later peripatetic career as an astronaut. Oh, he was very good at being alone.
“Did you both see the request for more pictures of each other? Ach. Shoot.” Helen, having licked the chocolate off her finger, has apparently gotten dust on her tongue as well. She makes a gargoyle face, wrinkling her nose and scraping her tongue with her teeth. They are less conscious of maintaining a certain decorum on Mars. Perhaps it is because they are all physically dirtier, perhaps because this is the least physically confined they will be during Eidolon and they are making the most of it.
“I hope they destroy all these videos and photos,” Sergei says. “Or there will be conspiracy theory. Like the moon landing deniers.”