But if Nora is—roughly—the Yoshi, then Ty is most like Sergei in temperament. Same sense of humor, same drive. This would make Dev Patek the Helen.
Helen knows what is said about her. People said things in which the word rock made a frequent appearance. Helen was solid as a rock, steady as a rock, was a person who had performed rock-star EVAs, but more constantly impressed in the way that astronauts were most frequently called upon to be rock stars: approaching every menial or humbling or uninteresting task as if her life depended on the perfection of its execution. Upon this rock, mighty as a rock.
“It is interesting,” Sergei says. He is examining the biographies. “Nora has two sons, they are a little older than my own, and she is still married. Ty is divorced with no children, and Dev—”
“Married,” Helen says. “No children. I know his wife, she’s a nurse; she’s lovely. I’ve spent time with his parents too: the nicest people.”
“Ah.” Yoshi leans forward and flicks Dev Patek’s picture, magnifying it. “So he’s a Helen but without the tragedy.”
It is a spectacularly unkind thing to say. Helen is stunned.
“In future, it won’t matter so much who goes,” Sergei says, as if he hadn’t heard this exchange. Possibly he hadn’t. “Bigger craft, bigger crew. You don’t need to be Shackleton to go to the South Pole now. You can be anyone with money for a plane ticket.”
“That is nonsense.” This is also an uncharacteristic statement from Yoshi: he is never dismissive. “That we will be able to go more quickly, yes,” he continues. “But a larger crew also has dangers. Division. Politics. Hierarchy. Lunatics. It will always matter who goes.”
“Shackleton isn’t the best example,” Helen says.
Sometimes, in her life, people had envied or resented her. And maybe they would say something like that, like, “Helen without the tragedy.” She had not expected this from Yoshi, though. She must not choose to be hurt.
? ? ?
THE THING TO NOTICE about this backup crew was that they were a complete unit and as individuals they did not replicate their own crew exactly. Members could not be swapped in to replace Sergei or Yoshi or Helen without the balance being disturbed. It was still all for one and one for all. Sergei and Yoshi should feel reassured, not threatened.
“It is like my dream,” Sergei says. “The cupboards that needed to be stripped before they would fit. The experience of going to space. It is layers. Layers of skill, layers of experience, layers of time. It is a wonder we still fit in our spacesuits.”
They are all changing. She has changed too. Maybe that’s not good. She was selected for this mission because of the person she was, not the person she is now. To look into space is always to look into the past. The Helen that was chosen was not this Helen.
She can’t quite remember how she was exactly.
Eidolon was too real. Sergei and Yoshi have forgotten that this was training. No, she’d forgotten it too. They should not be changed by this pretend mission to Mars. They should wait to change so they can be changed later, for real.
Yoshi is gazing at her in a pleading way. It is too much.
Helen looks to the screen that is meant to be a window. Venus is close, Earth is still very far away. Or you could say that Earth is right outside, and Venus is very far away. In either case, they have nowhere to go.
MIREILLE
You can go deeper if you want.”
Mireille does not want to go deeper, she has no great desire to jam her elbow into this guy’s rhomboids just to satisfy his misperception that pain must always equal benefit.
“Okay,” Mireille says, in her soothing voice. “Take a nice deep breath for me.”
The guy cannot take a nice deep breath. He doesn’t know how. He huffs. Also, his position on the table is not ideal: his stomach is too big to be squashed flat while lying facedown, and bulges out to the right, rolling him askew. She doesn’t judge that, or find it repellent, it’s only amazing that someone with seventy pounds of excess weight can seem genuinely mystified as to why he doesn’t feel awesome. What the hell does he think is happening? God, she is clear today. She could probably even help this guy, she’s so clear.
Mireille sucks in her cheeks. Her face is tired, like it ran a marathon, which it did. Yesterday, she spent six hours recording a facial library for a new game, a big one, one that she has a starring role in. All day long they had given her emotions and shades of emotions to do. Subtle things like Curious, Curious and Skeptical, Curious and Amused, Curious and Not Able to See Well. And then big things like Terror, Disgust, Rapture. They really wanted her to make the faces, really, really do them. Not one person had said, “That’s too much.” She’d gotten nothing but praise and a paycheck. It might have been one of the best days of her life.
“How’s the pressure now?” she asks. She’s supposed to use this guy’s name three times during a treatment. That’s one of the hotel spa’s “standards,” but she’s forgotten his name. Shuckerman or Shalliman or Chushkerman. Whoever he is, he grunts, because now he’s in pain. Everyone is in pain. Most people think pain in massage means something is happening, and if they can endure it, they will be improved, but sometimes the only thing pain means is pain.
It’s a very easy to mistake to make, though. She’d refused for the longest time to get therapy or take any psychoactive drugs because she’d felt that “darkness” was necessary, not just for her as an actor, but as a human being.
You didn’t have to feel slightly terrible all the time, as it turns out. Her only worry now was that slightly terrible was not a flaw in her chemistry, but an appropriate response to being the kind of person that she was. “You’re very hard on yourself,” Luke said.