Sergei forces his attention back to the screen, to react to the game highlights. He only has a few minutes of exercise left, and must capitalize on the opportunity to shout bad language and call people idiots.
Sergei had wanted to play hockey when he was a boy, but had chosen to focus on his studies. His father had said he’d not the right temperament for the sport, anyway. He would not even let Sergei watch, because he said being a fan of a sport you didn’t play made you a follower, and Sergei needed to be a leader. The old man had been a foolish guy; Sergei became a leader but not because of his father’s nonsense, which anyway was not intended to make him a leader. All this “to make you stronger” had always been bullshit, and they’d both known it. What his father wanted was to establish a weakness so that when, inevitably, Sergei became bigger, his father could exploit that weakness and topple the structure. Sergei could be a nice guy and say his father hadn’t quite known what he was doing, but come on. Sergei has sons now of his own. You know.
It’s important to see the truth of things. Okay, he can submit himself to this. People, his sister, but also many people, are always talking about their personal truths, and these are just stories, not so much truth as crutch.
He could be no better. He does not know what particular weakness he has. He thought he had been very careful about not allowing one, but it could be something Prime has done to him in particular, because they had seen it.
Or maybe his father had found him at last, beyond the grave, travelled all the way to Mars to knock his son to his knees.
HELEN
We’ve made up a song,” Helen says. “Would you like to hear it?”
“Should I get the camera?” Yoshi asks. “Or should I pretend that I have not heard you singing this song for the past hour?”
“Are you annoyed?”
“Not at all.”
“We’re cleaning the sleep sacks, the sleep sacks, the sleep sacks, we’re cleaning the sleep sacks so they will be nice!” Helen and Sergei sing.
They are cleaning the sleep sacks, it is true. It is a two-person job: one to hold, the other to brush on the dry shampoo. When they’d pulled Sergei’s sleep sack from his compartment, she’d been relieved to see he’d only affixed to the walls what he’d had up in his wedge on Primitus: a few religious icons of purely sentimental value and pictures of Dmitri and Ilya. Pieces of paper covered in a madman’s tiny script, or crabbed arithmetical glyphs would have been hard to ignore.
They usually listen to music during cleaning day, but neither Sergei nor Yoshi had seemed enthusiastic about making a selection, perhaps since today’s Music in Space! had been a rather long performance involving bagpipes. So they worked accompanied by the ambient noise of Red Dawn, the whirring and humming of their home. This noise was certainly not negligible, but Helen became aware of Sergei’s own silence. As much as possible, she likes to keep Sergei chatting now, because when he is talking she can be more or less certain of what is going on in his brain. She’d started to sing and he had joined in and then they found themselves unable to stop.
Yoshi, she thinks, is a little annoyed. She’d seen him earlier vacuuming in a very aggressive fashion, unlike his usual calm thoroughness. Yoshi likes a clean ship, but it is also his way, Helen thinks, of giving heft and validity to what can be seen and controlled.
Possibly she is exaggerating their vulnerability. Sergei may well be over his lapse of reason, and Yoshi may be perfectly content.
She has her own problem: she is very attractive just now. It’s unfortunate that without hair she should look so beautiful; Helen hopes that she’s the only one who has noticed. She wasn’t selected for this, she’s meant to be the female the other two males will not find alluring. It’s something of an effort to keep her hands off her own head, to not touch her neck, her waist, her thighs, her hips, her breasts, her stomach. Her skin is remarkable: in some places dry and papery like lovely parchment, and in other spots, warmly malleable like sweet dough. At night, in her sleep compartment, she holds parts of herself with a real appreciation.
They are all in extreme close-up; one notices the appearance of a new eyebrow hair. And yet they must communicate as if they are not noticing this. They must protect themselves, from Prime, from one another, from whatever parts of themselves they are grasping in the dark.
On all the Red Dawn screens now: Venus. Their view is shaded: Venus is too bright to look at with the naked eye, but in other ways it has not been enhanced in the ultraviolet-filter way the planet often is. Not, then, a hot mess of toxic chemicals and misshapen volcanoes covered in sulfuric acid clouds, orange and yellow, ugly, a planet gone wrong. No, it looks like what it should truly look like: a cream-colored ball, spinning very slowly in the opposite direction most other planets spin. They have to be disciplined about when they look at it, otherwise they would do nothing but look.
“I have good news,” Yoshi says. “The red pepper is ripe. We can eat it. This week’s winning recipe calls for a red pepper.”
The crew moves to the large console in the Science/Lab wedge.
“It’s a lot of steps.” Helen scans the recipe instructions. “But I guess no one needs Fifty Quick Recipes for Long-Duration Space Travel.”
The recipe says that it will take them three and a half hours to make this dish. Was preparing dinner a meaningful use of three and a half hours? Did knowing that part of this elaborate dinner’s function was to keep you occupied make it more, or less, meaningful?
Yoshi points out a line of the recipe that calls for three fresh bay leaves. “I see another sacrifice is called for. Alas, poor Mildred.”
Yoshi had given the herbs in their garden lab these sorts of names. Mildred. Dorcas. Ermengarde. He hadn’t named the vegetables: the zucchini, spinach, red pepper, pale descendants of the Primitus garden lab.