The tuba concerto is over. They must now record their reaction. The astronauts applaud.
“Thank you very much, Long Kwan and the Hong Kong Baptist University Symphony Orchestra,” says Yoshi, “for that beautiful performance. On behalf of the crew of Red Dawn, I salute your skill and dedication. We were so grateful to be your audience in space today.”
There is nothing to do but keep going. They have a schedule.
If Prime had made the voyage out as dynamic as possible, with weeks of calamity or near calamity, their time now is marked by a shift into automated regularity. Were the astronauts capable of setting and maintaining a busy self-guided schedule when there was no immediate cause for them to do anything? Yes, of course they were. Everyone knew that if they were not busy, they would become unhappy and not perform well.
They might give in to paranoia.
So they will maintain their Hab and keep their skills sharp by training in sims. They will conduct such scientific experiments as the limited space for equipment allows. They will exercise, maintain their craft, and engage in public discourse and educational outreach concerning their mission.
“The tuba is a more dynamic instrument than I’ve appreciated,” Yoshi says.
“I’ve heard that being a professional tuba player is extremely competitive, much more so than other instruments,” Helen says. “In an orchestra, you might have thirty violinists. But there’s only one tuba. And it’s a very loud instrument, and you’re the only one playing it, so it’s very obvious if you make a mistake.”
“Yes, a mistake would be very obvious,” Sergei says. The words come slowly out of his mouth.
Yoshi doesn’t look at Helen. He cannot remember how often he gazed at her, before the dust devil moment, or how often he looked at Sergei, before he took them to the Lav and confessed he was delusional. He would have looked them both in the eyes whenever he addressed them, at least some of the time. And there would’ve been just general looking, in the way one did. Yoshi doesn’t want to seem to be looking at either one of them less or more. They will notice. Prime will notice.
“Time for haircuts!” Yoshi says, and they move from the Galley/Recreation wedge, where they’ve been listening to music, to the Science/Lab wedge. They are not getting haircuts. They are removing five strands of hair from each of their scalps with tweezers. The roots will be analyzed for gene expression change. It is a useful and easy way to look at the effect of cosmic radiation on their bodies, stress levels, and metabolic conditions, particularly good on Red Dawn because it requires no equipment other than tweezers, a storage box the size of a toothbrush holder, a small portion of their single freezer, and RoMeO.
“But I do need a haircut,” Helen says as Sergei dons medical gloves. Helen is starting many sentences lately with the word but, an indicator that her listeners are joining in late to some sort of internal monologue or debate. It is driving Yoshi mad.
No, he is quite fine.
“We all need a haircut.” Sergei’s movements are not erratic, not distracted. He moves with the deliberate pace that all of them practice in Red Dawn, where it is easy to bang an elbow. The walls are a pale silver and this and the curves—especially in their small sleeping pods set above storage spaces—create a slight illusion of more space than actually exists.
It is true, about the haircuts, at least in his case. Sergei’s wheat-blond hair grows downward, into a neat cap, but Yoshi’s hair goes vertical until the weight brings it down, and the vertical stage is a little too comical. The situation on Red Dawn is already teetering toward farce.
“I should have shaved my head when you two did,” Helen says.
Sergei removes five strands of Helen’s hair at the roots, performs the same service for Yoshi, then hands Yoshi the tweezers. For a paranoiac, Sergei seems perfectly content to offer up his nucleic acids. Yoshi must not exclude the possibility that Yoshi is the one suffering from paranoia, or that he has fed from Sergei’s. Whatever happens to one astronaut can easily happen to the rest. They are at risk for contamination—paranoia is psychologically communicable—and Red Dawn is too small to dedicate any location for crew isolation.
“I want to shave my head,” Helen says.
“Chuhh,” says Sergei. “Okay.”
“I’m serious,” Helen says. “That’s the kind of haircut I am requesting. It will be so much easier. I don’t want to dry shampoo for seven months. It’s silly that I didn’t do it before.”
Helen wants to shave her head? Where in Helen was this desire located, what was its source, what did she see when she saw herself bereft of hair?
“Okay,” Sergei says. “Will be best if we cut short, and then use the vacuum shaver.”
“When would you like to put it on the schedule?” Yoshi asks, because he must not betray any consternation. Yoshi has a vision of the kind of Victorian lockets containing the hair of the beloved. He had thought of asking Madoka once if she would contribute a lock to a locket, for him to take with him to space. She would have done it. What had stopped him? Perhaps knowing that things like lockets with hair in them were very fine in literature but should not be attempted in real life, lest they fail to live up to literature.
“We could do it now,” Helen says. “And move the Venus Probe Sims back a half hour? It shouldn’t take long. Just hack and buzz!”
“Changing the schedule on the fly is Prime recommended,” Yoshi says. It is true. They must not become too dependent on routine—it puts them at risk for torpidity, which rather seems the least of their worries at this point.