Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

This is the morning of a new day. And so it is, but in this new day they’ll circle the earth sixteen times. They’ll see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, sixteen days and sixteen nights.

Then track the seasons through many years, and the man is manoeuvring his creaking parched self into a pair of trousers and wondering how he seems to have aged so much more than his wife who is still wiry-spry and steps out with a spring. He can’t muster much saliva any more and nobody told him that old age would be quite so dry, his skin, mouth and eyes – his nose with nothing much left to blow (he blows it anyway, all the time). What a stupefyingly ill-prepared thing his body is to dry up. Like a leaf, you might think, but a dry leaf falls from the branch and he isn’t ready to go. Gets up at dawn and stands at the dyke where the bullfrogs belch and digs his toes in.

After six months in space they will, in technical terms, have aged 0.007 seconds less than someone on earth. But in other respects they’ll have aged five or ten years more, and this is only in the ways they currently understand. They know that the vision can weaken and the bones deteriorate. Even with so much exercise still the muscles will atrophy. The blood will clot and the brain shift in its fluid. The spine lengthens, the T cells struggle to reproduce, kidney stones form. While they’re here food tastes of little. Their sinuses are murder. Proprioception falters – it’s hard to know where their body parts are without looking. They become misshapen bags of fluid, too much in the upper body and not enough lower down. Fluid gathers behind the eyeball and squashes the optic nerve. Sleep mutinies. Their gut microbiomes grow new bacteria. Their cancer risk increases.

Its beauty echoes – its beauty is its echoing, its ringing singing lightness. It’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre; it’s not everything and it’s not nothing, but it seems much more than something. It’s made of rock but appears from here as gleam and ether, a nimble planet that moves three ways – in rotation on its axis, at a tilt on its axis, and around the sun.

This thing that harbours we humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.

They think: maybe it’s hard being human and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s hard to shift from thinking your planet is safe at the centre of it all to knowing in fact it’s a planet of normalish size and normalish mass rotating about an average star in a solar system of average everything in a galaxy of innumerably many, and that the whole thing is going to explode or collapse.

Maybe human civilisation is like a single life – we grow out of the royalty of childhood into supreme normality; we find out about our own unspecialness and in a flush of innocence we feel quite glad – if we’re not special then we might not be alone.

We make wishful and fearful projections through books, films and the like about how it might look, this alien life, when it finally makes contact. But it doesn’t make contact and we suspect in truth that it never will. It’s not even out there, we think. Why bother waiting when there’s nothing there? And now maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.

What are you anyway as an astronaut but a conduit – you are selected for your non-stick temperament, maybe one day a robot could do your job and maybe it will; you have to wonder. They do sometimes wonder. A robot has no need for hydration, nutrients, excretion, sleep, a robot has no irksome brain fluids or menstruation or libido or taste buds. You don’t have to fly fruit to it on a rocket or fill it with vitamins and antioxidants and sleeping pills and painkillers, nor build for it a toilet with funnels and pumps that requires a training course to use, nor a unit that recycles its urine into drinking water, since it has no urine and it needs no water and it wants and asks for nothing.

There are maybe twelve hours before it hits, and you are on an island that’s off an island that’s in the ocean, hopelessly low-lying. So all you can do is lie low hopelessly. You survived all the others. You have a house made of tin, cardboard, hardboard and sticks, and these days the typhoons are so frequent and huge that there’s no point in building something better, it’s easier to have nothing much to lose than to keep losing something.

Because who can look at man’s neurotic assault on the planet and find it beautiful? Man’s hubris. A hubris so almighty it’s matched only by his stupidity. And these phallic ships thrust into space are surely the most hubristic of them all, the totems of a species gone mad with self-love.

To herself, in her quarters, she gives a dumb nod, though she’s not sure she does see; when it comes to it she doesn’t know her mother at all. It’s just imaginings and projections, and they could all be wrong.

Too bad for you, it consoles, that you’ve drifted too long, you’ve floated too long, that the clocks in your cells have gone off their pace. Too bad for you that when you wake up in the morning you don’t know where your arm is until you look, that without the feedback of weight your limbs are mislaid. (Where did I put it, that arm? says the panicked brain. Where did I leave it?) Too bad for you that your limbs are lost in space and that those lost in space are lost too in time.

At night they can point to home – there’s Seattle, Osaka, London, Bologna, St Petersburg and Moscow – Moscow one enormous point of light like the Pole Star in a shrill clear sky. The night’s electric excess takes their breath. The spread of life. The way the planet proclaims to the abyss: there is something and someone here.

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

What chance that any such life form will ever discover it, this golden disc, much less have any way of playing it, much less decode what the brainwaves mean? An infinitesimally small chance. Not a chance. But all the same the disc and its recordings will wander, trapped for eternity, around the Milky Way. In five billion years when the earth is long dead, it’ll be a love song that outlives spent suns. The sound signature of a love-flooded brain, passing through the Oort Cloud, through solar systems, past hurtling meteorites, into the gravitational pull of stars that don’t yet exist.

How are we writing the future of humanity? We’re not writing anything, it’s writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf.

by mid-afternoon on New Year’s Eve had evolved into their most opportunistic and crafty form, the igniters of fire, the hackers in stone, the melters of iron, the ploughers of earth, the worshippers of gods, the tellers of time, the sailors of ships, the wearers of shoes, the traders of grain, the discoverers of lands, the schemers of systems, the weavers of music, the singers of song, the mixers of paint, the binders of books, the crunchers of numbers, the slingers of arrows, the observers of atoms, the adorners of bodies, the gobblers of pills, the splitters of hairs, the scratchers of heads, the owners of minds, the losers of minds, the predators of everything, the arguers with death, the lovers of excess, the excess of love, the addled with love, the deficit of love, the lacking for love, the longing for love, the love of longing, the two-legged thing, the human being.

We’re caught in a universe of collision and drift, the long slow ripples of the first Big Bang as the cosmos breaks apart; the closest galaxies smash together, then those that are left scatter and flee one another until each is alone and there’s only space, an expansion expanding into itself, an emptiness birthing itself, and in the cosmic calendar as it would exist then, all humans ever did and were will be a brief light that flickers on and off again one single day in the middle of the year, remembered by nothing.

Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.

Away from the planet held hostage by humans, a gun to its vitals, teetering slightly on its canting orbit, away into virgin up-for-sale wilderness, this new black gold, this new domain ripe for the taking.

Maybe we’re the new dinosaurs and need to watch out. But then maybe against all the odds we’ll migrate to Mars where we’ll start a colony of gentle preservers, people who’ll want to keep the red planet red, we’ll devise a planetary flag because that’s a thing we lacked on earth and we’ve come to wonder if that’s why it all fell apart, and we’ll look back at the faint dot of blue that is our old convalescing earth and we’ll say, Do you remember? Have you heard the tales?