Who could verify it? Meeps was the sole audience member for Helen’s marriage. When Helen and Eric were together in public, Eric expressed only praise and admiration for her. In private, she was subject to his loving sarcasm. But she’d allowed that, almost from the beginning. It had seemed fatherly to Helen—she who could not remember the time when her father was capable of chewing, let alone sarcasm. Why had she?
She’d not had a lot of experience with men. The ones who were her intellectual equals had invariably sought softer mates, and the others had stayed away. Intimidated was the word friends used, though repelled might be more accurate.
Eric had assigned her an identity. Helen was logical, rational, didactic, meticulous. Not unlike a robot, a lovable robot. Helen was supposed—by Eric—not to be good at a number of things, expressive, feeling-type things. Perhaps she would have protested more against this assigned identity if it hadn’t been for sex. In bed—or multiple locations; Eric was inventive—she had felt known and absolutely at her ease. It did not seem likely that Eric could “get” her so completely there, when she was exposed in every possible way, and “not get” her otherwise. Furthermore, that Eric should assign her a personality that did not seem particularly lovable, and then tell her that he loved her, had seemed significant. She had to think him wonderful. Who else would love the person he described?
It was, of course, perfectly possible to grasp fundamentals and miss the concept. And then, there had always been a strand of guilt running through the whole thing. Eric had made it clear that he was content to have large parts of his self remain unknowable to her (essentially limited) understanding. This he did out of love. He loved her despite herself so much that he didn’t even expect to be loved back. He didn’t expect more from her. She had been grateful, but only because she hadn’t properly understood the gift.
Eric had schooled Meeps in the robot version of Helen. She’d made it easy for him: she had left. Not just once, but repeatedly. An astronaut’s job was almost never in space, but it was always training, traveling, weeks away, months away. As Meeps’s father, this would not have been so remarkable.
She could not now fight back or redeem herself in her daughter’s eyes without throwing dirt on a ghost, throwing dirt on dirt.
“Helen.” It is Sergei again. Helen glances at her watch. An hour has passed. It is okay. She knows exactly where the Prime camera is inside the greenhouse, since she was the one who installed it. Her face had not been in its view and she has been working steadily, so her performance was still nominal.
“Yes, Sergei.”
“Nearing the site now.”
Helen moves so she can take a look at her crewmates’ faces in the cab of the Rover. They still look happy.
The Arsia Mons sortie had been harder on Sergei than Helen had anticipated. The actual exploration had been marvelous and they both loved it: the planning and the execution had been exhilarating and physically demanding. It was the long Rover ride that had challenged. She’d not realized how dependent Sergei was on daily vigorous exercise. For herself, she’d managed by employing a yogic technique known as fire breath, and then another biofeedback trick involving imagining her bloodstream as a river, but Sergei had gotten very squirrelly.
With Yoshi it was a little trickier. She’d thought it was important to him to have personal space, but there were limits to this. Give him just a little, and he was perfectly content. Too much and he became anxious, as had seemed to happen during the Arsia Mons sortie. Of the three of them, he was maybe the best at communal living.
Helen had only eight more sols to wear Sergei out like a puppy, and grant Yoshi the correct amount of personal space, before they all got back into an even smaller module for an even longer amount of time. This took some juggling.
“Sergei, how are the greenhouse solars?”
“Looking a little clogged, Helen.”
“I’m going to come out and do a good sweep. Would you mind sticking around and helping me out? We should do SA1 and 2 while we’re at it.”
Sergei does not mind, with alacrity.
“Yoshi,” Helen continues, “let’s practice the transfer. You can take over the Hab and keep an eye on those drones.”
Yoshi thinks this is an excellent suggestion. They sign off.
“GAIA,” says Helen. “Please work on the rye now. I’m going to suit up.”
“Okay, Helen,” says GAIA. “I will prepare the rye trays.”
“GAIA, what are you doing?”
“Helen, I am preparing the carrot trays. Would you like me to work on another task?”
“GAIA, cancel preparing the carrot trays. Proceed with the rye trays.”
“Helen, I am canceling preparing the carrot trays. I am proceeding with the rye trays.”
“GAIA, that is correct.”
Helen moves out of the greenhouse attachment and through the inflatable tunnel back to the EVA prep room of Primitus.
Was it too late? It wasn’t good for Meeps to have a father she loved more with every absent year, and a mother whose past absence was an ongoing source of blame. Did Meeps need her to stay now? Would giving up Mars for Meeps make her daughter understand that she was loved?
Did the fact that she did not want to give up Mars for her daughter mean that she didn’t love her daughter?
Maybe Eric had made her into the thing he thought she was, or maybe he had been right all along, and there was nothing more to her, and a great deal less, than she had always supposed.
Yoshi is ready to come in. Helen is ready to come out. They make the transfer smoothly, and Helen joins Sergei, waiting just outside the hatch. They move to the Solar Array One. Helen feels better being outside, with the sweep of the valley before her and a task that requires larger movements. She does not think about Meeps, or Eric.
They are a quarter of the way through clearing SA2 when a weather alert comes through. Two dust devils, south of the landing site, but on the move. Helen scans the telemetry being loaded onto her screen.