Sergei turns his eyes back to the screen. The film was made in 1924, one of the first science-fiction movies, though more political message wrapped in science fiction. Sergei doesn’t care about these old politics, and the Mars imagined here is preposterous. Still, it is a nice change and there is a good tradition of watching really bad space movies. The films Prime recommends for them now are all people overcoming odds, triumph-of-the-will-type things, meant to inspire. Sergei knows that he needs to have a triumph of will, but he can’t tell what direction this effort should go in. He would prefer to watch something like a comedy where everyone is doing the wrong thing in funny ways. But he will watch anything. He doesn’t like to be alone with his thoughts now. He needs a movie, or someone talking. He needs to fall asleep in “the saddle,” as the expression goes, to avoid that terrible moment when the responsibility for his thoughts is clearly his and his alone.
Sergei’s loneliness is total, unbridgeable. Things—talk, information, jokes—do not keep him company but they do prod him forward. He cannot read, unless it is work. He falls out of sentences after a paragraph, even if it’s the kind of book deliberately meant to be sheer entertainment.
“It’s not very good,” Sergei gestures at the screen. “It’s no White Sun of the Desert.”
“Ha ha,” says Helen. Yoshi stirs. He has not been fully asleep.
“There are robot slaves on Mars?” Yoshi blinks at the screen.
“By decree of the Elders,” Sergei explains. “One third of the planet’s life force is stored in refrigerators. The rest are slaves.”
“It’s fun to watch some of these obscure things,” Helen says.
Helen must still be parceling out things like this, “saving” movies and books and ideas and feelings, in anticipation of doing it all again. There are days when this seems right to him too, and those days are easiest.
Other days he suffers. Sometimes for himself, sometimes for his crew. If it is revealed that they have been to Mars, his crewmates might go crazy. Imagine. To have gone to Mars, and not noticed.
Sergei takes his eyes off the screen and considers their mascot, Tycho. The little man currently embraces a ventilation hose suspended from their ceiling and is wearing a wig made from some of Helen’s hair. They celebrated Helen’s birthday yesterday. Sergei and Yoshi had sung a duet and let her have both their week’s rations of M&M’s.
“I think I’ve missed a few plot points of this movie.” Helen yawns.
“This is the beginning,” he says. “Of thinking that there are things we’ve missed.” He had not meant to say that out loud. He must be more careful. It is a problem that he has to measure some of himself by how Helen and Yoshi react to him, because they are not very reactive people.
But they can all have fun times, they can show themselves to be in good spirits. Fully awake now, Helen and Yoshi join Sergei in calling out in Russian to the actors on the screen, booing, making jokes, until the movie ends.
It is time for bed now. Sergei has arranged his schedule so that he does an additional twenty minutes of light cardio before bed. Prime was worried exercising late in the evening would interrupt his sleep patterns, because they have data to show this can happen, but Sergei is not a lab mouse and, just now, he sleeps better after a little exercise. Helen and Yoshi call it “Sergei walking the dog.”
Helen and Yoshi go to their sleep pods and Sergei moves to the Exercise wedge, loads his screen with Gagarin Cup highlights from March. If he looks upset, or his heart rate jumps up, his jogging on the treadmill and a disastrous season from the Gladiators will provide cover from his Prime watchers.
Exercise is when Sergei allows himself to think, although it would be better for him if he didn’t think at all, and just watched ice hockey. But he knows what he will do. He will run it all through his head, again:
He is walking toward the Hab. He sees the green lights surrounding the Hab, the Hab itself. He sees the cable in his hands, and the regolith under his feet. Rocks and sky. Tracks from the Rovers. And then his screen goes flat green, and then black, and a line of words, flashing too quickly for him to read but—he is almost certain—containing the word FAILURE, and then no sim at all.
Everyone knows what Mars looks like: butterscotch sky and caramel rocks.
But really, no one knows for sure what Mars looks like. It is not so simple, taking a photograph on another planet and then sending this photograph to Earth. Many images collected from Mars take days to assemble, and the differences in light and dust in the atmosphere will be smoothed over for coherence. Some of the cameras use infrared color filters, or ultraviolet, useful for science but not for capturing what the human eye would experience. Still, we can say that we are close to knowing what Mars looks like, and that had been their simulated Mars: Prime’s best guess based on the best guesses available.
What Prime had not been able to give them was a living color palette. Sergei had timed it, how the light shifted every half hour on the half hour, mimicking the gains and losses of their smaller, dimmer sun. The light never moved within the half hour. His shadow on Mars was, for twenty-nine minutes, a dead man. There was also the slightly surreal aspect to your crewmates that the sim created during an EVA, and the knowledge that the tools you were using had been made lighter, that the Rover wasn’t really roving.
It was hard for him to ignore these things, but he’d tried. And he’d gotten quite close. So maybe he felt more like he was in a video game than he was on Mars, but at least he started believing the video game.
When his Mars sim failed, he should have seen Utah.
But he hadn’t seen Utah. He would have known Utah. Utah was seventy-eight million kilometers closer to the sun and the horizon was quite different. Months and months ago, he had walked with his crewmates around the perimeter of the swell location where Primitus sat. He had seen what could be seen. Martian only if one was near-sighted. A good rocky plain, but clearly, in the distance: mountains. A big, bright sun. Blue sky. The sim had needed to obscure all these things, and many more.