“It sounds like a movie.” Helen is trying to be helpful. “Or a cartoon?”
“The first time I spent time in a sensory deprivation tank.” Yoshi has located the memory. “Yes. At first I closed my eyes—this is an instinct, for relaxation, yes?—and then I became very curious about the darkness. It was my first true opportunity to look at complete absence of light. I knew that it took twenty minutes for one’s eyes to adjust. That’s when I saw the demons. Pointed Batman heads and bodies like rays. It was not, of course, that I believed in their existence. I had read that hallucination in the tank is quite common, for sane people. It’s the schizophrenic who is most relaxed in the absence of stimuli. The demons did not last long. They were replaced by stars. After the stars, my eyes were adjusted and I saw nothing. And never again, in any sensory deprivation situation, did I experience a visual construction.”
“So this means you are schizophrenic.” Sergei laughs. “If you were normal, you would still imagine crazy things. Helen, you hallucinate in sensory deprivation, of course?”
“Oh, of course. Rainbow cows jumping through the clouds.”
“Yes. Me too. I see a baby with a goatee juggling apricots. But that is because we are sane. Poor Yoshi.”
Yoshi knows they are joking, teasing, even being kind. But his unease, which had subsided, is returning. He remembers, in the sensory deprivation tank, the loss of a frame of reference for his own body. He had moved his torso sideways, bending, and had kept moving until he felt a muscular resistance. At that point, he could have sworn that his right ear was only two or three inches from touching the side of his right knee.
The perimeters, the edges of life had moved away on Mars. There was nothing here to bind you. Nothing already made. Nothing already constructed. No people who came before you. No culture, no language, no one to recognize you.
Helen’s face moves fully into frame now on Yoshi’s screen. Her hair is down, the lights of the Rover turning her curls into a nimbus of greenish gold.
“Hey there, Yoshi,” she says.
It is okay. He is located, he is found. He is not lost on a distant planet, he—
“Oh.”
Yoshi has just remembered that he is not actually on Mars.
HELEN
Helen, how is your daughter behaving?”
Helen moves crablike—the greenhouse aisles are narrow—to the screen connecting her to Sergei, on sortie right now with Yoshi in Rover II.
“We’re still having some torque issues,” she says. “I’m a little concerned about balance.” Helen angles the screen so that Sergei can have a look at her “daughter”: GAIA. For seven months, GAIA existed only as a computer program the astronauts occasionally consulted or trained with on Primitus; the rest of the robot had traveled in the cargo hold. Helen had been the one to put body and program together—thus, Sergei’s joke about her maternal role. It still jars Helen to see GAIA walking around with her small steps, like a child in her mother’s high heels, handling objects, rotating the wreath of cameras and sensors that serve as her head to focus, occasionally, on Helen.
“Anyway. You two having fun?”
“There is no man,” Sergei states, “who does not enjoy flying remote-controlled things.” Yoshi appears behind Sergei at this point, lofting a pressure-suit thumbs-up, all smiles beneath his helmet. When he moves away and Sergei shifts his screen, Helen gets a tantalizing glimpse of copper sands and paler outcropping. Sergei and Yoshi are testing the camera drones on a small hill to the north of the site. Helen would very much like to have gone with them. She likes flying remote-controlled things too. But Yoshi had stayed behind on the Arsia Mons sortie, and she judged that the greenhouse was too finicky a job for Sergei’s current mood.
Here she is, in the garden of Mars, letting the boys drive the car and play with toys so they don’t get too fretful or have to drink too much liquorice tea. This is part of being commander. It was father and mother rolled into one, Adam and Eve. It was not merely for her skills as an engineer that she had been chosen, nor for her experience. All those data collections suggesting that if you were to put a woman into a crew of men for long-duration space missions, it would be best if the woman were of a “motherly” disposition. Considering her limited skills as an actual mother, this was more funny than offensive, but Helen knew that, without her intending it, certain words or actions would be interpreted as motherly, by virtue of her biology.
Of course, there was also another definition for “motherly” that read: too old or otherwise not appealing to be considered sexually viable by others. If this was true, it was fortunate that hers was a career where her lack of sexual appeal made her more valuable.
That’s absolutely how she should think about that. It’s a plus.
No, truly. That’s how she will think about that.
“We will be back in one hour.” Sergei points to Rover II, behind him. “If you need help.”
“Well,” Helen says. “It’s kind of crowded in here already. And I think I have it under control.”
“Of course you do.” Sergei gives a cheerful sign-off salute. Yoshi can be seen, all but skipping, right behind him. Helen sidesteps back down the aisle.
“GAIA, let’s finish these nitrate fixers.”
“Okay, Helen.”