“The thing they most liked was the Christmas song.” Helen breaks another piece of chocolate off the bar using a new technique: touching only the wrapping. She hands the piece to Sergei. “I don’t know if we can repeat that. Maybe they should hold on to it, just in case.”
“True.” Sergei chomps on his chocolate. “But come on. It is Mars. It should be enough. We don’t have to do musical about it.”
Yoshi watches as Helen breaks a piece of chocolate off for him.
“I went to Mars,” Yoshi says, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
“Holy crap, Yoshi,” Sergei says.
Helen hands Yoshi his chocolate. “I learned that in school,” she says. “Henry David Thoreau. Speaking about Walden Pond, not Mars. But that’s great, Yoshi. Just excellent.” Helen does not sound totally pleased.
Their screens ping. It is Prime’s last uplink of the sol. These do not include any messages from family and friends, or Earth news, but are generally a confirmation of the latest telemetry. This one includes a video someone at Prime has put together from images and film of week one. They move to the Science/Lab wedge to watch on the largest screen.
A song plays, and their week of slow, deliberate, meticulous, and technical labor unfolds like a kind of dream ballet. Here are Helen and Yoshi, suiting up for the first EVA. Now, the opening of the hatch. Each of their boot prints in the rusty regolith. Helen and Sergei, making adjustments to the solar array, their movements deft and harmonious. Sergei, in slow motion, removing his helmet in the EVA prep room, and smiling. Yoshi can remember feeling tired at the end of yester-sol as he ate noodles, but had not imagined himself looking so wearily heroic while he did so. Helen bending over and trying to shake the fines from her hair, then straightening up and making a rueful face. She is magnificent.
The crew plays the video through a second time, entranced by how their experience appears.
Mars looks so beautiful.
They look so brave.
SERGEI
Man is an explorer, but always he has needed to seek shelter from the environment and predators, and in his caves he found the rest to reflect, tell stories, and make paintings on the walls.
They are looking for a good cave.
This is a man’s job. Well, technically it will first be a robot’s job to enter a cave. The thought of introducing a human to subsurface Mars makes the collective Office of Planetary Protection throw up with anxiety, and while a robot from Earth is not a perfectly clean thing, it is judged to be cleaner than a man. Once the robot confirms that there is no life to destroy in the cave, man can follow.
First, they must get the robot to the cave, and this is a man’s job because a robot is slow and can’t make decisions on the spot. Also it is not a simple thing, to instruct a robot to spelunk with style.
The Rover drives itself, although one of them must remain in the front of the cab, ready to manually override the automation if necessary. Sergei amuses himself by imagining how Prime is conducting this particular sim. They cannot drive all over the San Rafael Swell, but it feels like the Rover is going the right distance. It is possible that Prime is driving them in circles. He has a very good internal compass. Nothing in his body believes they are driving in a circle.
Who knows? Sergei sometimes wonders if the muove of the eppur si muove was Prime shipping them to Antarctica. He does not know how Prime is getting it to feel so cold. He is feeling the cold more because various suit malfunctions have caused the heaters in his gloves and boots to fail at different times, and in those situations his fingers and toes went numb. At first he was proud that Prime was making this extra effort to give him a convincing Mars experience, it spoke to their respect for his skepticism. (Unless it spoke to his vulnerability to irritation.) Anyway, now he has decided to make a conscious effort to accept what is put before him. Both Helen and Yoshi are better pretenders than he is, and he does not want to be left out of the experience. Also, he would like Prime to stop monkeying around with his equipment. These thirty days will be the best part of Eidolon, and they are going too fast. He does not want to be hobbled in any way.
What walks you could take on Mars. He would like to walk the whole planet. With thirty days you could do almost nothing, but a year and a half would be so good you would not mind getting back inside a little tuna can for nine months. You would not mind so much. This is a flaw in the Eidolon plan. They had shortened the Mars time to only thirty days, and so the feelings that the crew would have about getting into Red Dawn and leaving the planet would be totally different than they would be after a year and a half on the planet. Maybe after a year and a half, they would be ready to return home.
The Rover is packed with equipment and supplies, they can move around very little and mostly they stay up front, watching the terrain or napping in the back. Lava fields are not the most exciting views, but Helen is a good companion, not too chatty. They are permitted to perform short EVAs when the solar batteries of the Rover are recharging.