The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

You can’t train for irrelevance.

People who are devoted to aromatherapy are not usually humorists.

If her mother goes to Mars, then that will be the only story of Mireille’s life. It will wipe out everything.

It changed his walk, to know he was a man going to space.

She doesn’t want the epiphany of motherhood. She isn’t interested in learning that it’s “not all about her.” She is quite well aware of that already.

Why go to space at all? One could stand on a staircase and go where no one has ever gone. Why go to Mars? People would go to Mars and what? Destroy it, and make a bunch of art.

the cognitive distance between human beings who could dream and then make a Manus V, and human beings who selfishly crammed an extra bag into the overhead compartment.

More, much more, than geeking out on how we are going to get to Mars, or why, or what we should do when we get there, what Luke wants to understand is who. Who are these people that can withstand such a trip, the danger, the risk, the isolation, the pressure? What can these people teach us?

The brain could be altered. The brain clearly, in many cases, should be altered.

I remember someone telling me that you should always ask people to interpret your dreams. You won’t learn anything about your dream, but you’ll learn a lot about the other person.”

Earth was so much more beautiful in space, when you could just look at it, not be on it.

After landing, once they carried her out of the Soyuz and set her down in a lawn chair in a Kazakhstan field, she had seen a lesser spotted eagle in the sky, and had been overwhelmed with a kind of tender pity for the planet and everything on it.

It had been a source of great sadness, to see that his father could be ignorant.

You could be the father (or Father) that talks and talks and nobody believes anyway, or you could be the father that shows.

Dmitri couldn’t imagine being friends with people the way his father was, because that was the kind of friendship you only had when you went through a massive experience together, like a war, or being in space. Even if his father didn’t like Helen and Yoshi, he’d end up being better friends with them than Dmitri was with anybody,

Awareness of imminent possible death is not without beneficial properties. Risk of annihilation can be a key ingredient, like baking soda. A teaspoon or so is sufficient to make all the other components rise up in glory, but without it? No cake. For some, the edge of death is the only place to find love of life. And having once felt this event horizon and yet escaped, they must return again and again, testing, testing. For these people, alive is not alive. Almost dead is the only alive.

Microgravity is the heroin, the God, the unrequited love, of astronauts. Nothing feels as good or does more damage.

She has discovered that there is something both liberating and self-punishing about wearing a costume or disguise that no one has asked you to wear.

it is considered ethically complicated to program a robot to say “I love you” to a human. Most people don’t mind a robot saying they love them, personally, but do not want a robot loving other people, people that the human loves, perhaps not as well, or at least not as demonstrably, as the robot. Then there is the problem of reciprocity. It is remarkably easy to love a robot.

School is fine but it’s pointless to get excited about anyone solving any kind of problem. Everything that we know right now about everything is probably wrong. If you think about it, it’s entirely possible that the sun really does orbit the Earth, in the ultimate true reality of the 10th dimension alien race that is playing our collective consciousness as a video game that we haven’t discovered yet.

Americans always desire happiness, so they fear sadness, unlike Russians, who can draw strength from mourning. The Japanese too, Sergei understands, have an easier relationship with melancholy.

At first her father’s face still looked like her father. It didn’t look empty, like a person wasn’t inside him. Gradually it looked empty, but maybe because they stopped feeling so much when they looked at it. Maybe they were the ones who became empty.

think about how a Helen two thousand years ago would have looked at a distant tiny dot in the firmament and not known the first thing about it. To not think of all the hundreds of Helens that had been born and died, not knowing, until we reached a Helen—her!—who would stand on that tiny dot.

Exploration without science is merely adventure.

“It is okay to be dependent on machines,” Yoshi says out loud. “No, it’s fine. On Earth, we do, we are. Earth is not really a hospitable planet. Without machines, existence would be pitiful, if you even survived. ‘Nasty, brutish, and short.’ We have made the Earth a place we can live on, with machines.

Yoshi feels as if he is rowing against the current of his own brain.

It’s the schizophrenic who is most relaxed in the absence of stimuli.

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.

“You love your mother.” Madoka had not quite made it into a question, to be safe. “Yes,” says Mireille. “It’s not that simple, but yes.” “You see,” Madoka says, “that is something a robot can’t do. A robot can’t say yes in the way you just said it. You could ask one of my PEPPERs if it loved, and it could run a computation, as you did, and decide to answer yes based on certain evaluations, as you did. But it would just be yes, in the end. It wouldn’t be a sad yes.”

“Can you imagine the kind of person that I’d be if I wasn’t hard on myself?”

At a certain point, you probably had to stop thinking about what your mother did or didn’t do to you, and start thinking about what you did or didn’t do to your mother.

An artist should know when to walk away from a work, to let a moment happen without comment, without greed, without display or audience or any kind of need.

All of this is an immense silence with words on top of it.

I forget what I am because I have been so long simulating the man I wish to be that I now believe myself to be this man.

Would you rather I loved you incorrectly forever, or correctly but potentially less?

you will lift your head to the heavens, as humans have always done, as they must. And you will wonder. The love that brings you back to Earth is not the same love that makes you want to leave this Earth, it is not the same love, no, but it is no less a love. It is love too, that makes you lift your head and wonder.