Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

Anton the spaceship’s heart. Pietro its mind, Roman (the current commander, dextrous and capable, able to fix anything, control the robotic arm with millimetre precision, wire the most complex circuit board) its hands, Shaun its soul (Shaun there to convince them all that they have souls), Chie (methodical, fair, wise, not-quite definable or pin-downable) its conscience, Nell (with her eight-litre diving lungs) its breath.

They could still be led to believe that God himself had dropped it there, at the very centre of the waltzing universe, and they could forget all those truths men and women had uncovered (via a jerking and stuttering path of discovery followed by denial followed by discovery followed by cover-up) that the earth is a piddling speck at the centre of nothing.

Velcroed to the wall in the Russian galley they have a photograph of Sergei Krikalev, the first Russian on the first expedition to the space station, the man who helped build it, the man who, before that, was sent to space by the USSR and was in orbit on Mir for almost six months longer than planned, because, while he was there, the USSR ceased to exist and he couldn’t get home.

Nell had ever been afraid of nothingness, once she was in it she was consoled by it inexplicably and yearned –

even at night there’s only one man-made border in the whole of the world; a long trail of lights between Pakistan and India.

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 lan...

The crack that’s appeared outside gives a millimetre or two. It sends out fissures that broadly echo an aerial map of the confluencing Volga River. It’s not so far from Roman’s head, this crack, on the other side of the thin alloy shell, and no patching with epoxy and Kapton tape is going to hold it. The pressure in the Russian module drops just a fraction, barely noticeable, not enough to sound any alarm, and the clocks count themselves round towards waking time and the onset of another blitzed and man-made day.