Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

They were told this in training: keep a tally each day when you wake, tell yourself this is the morning of a new day. Be clear with yourself on

Don’t go back. Stay here ongoing. The creamy light off the ocean so exquisite; the gentle clouds rippling in tides. With a zoom lens the first fall of snow on the top of Mount Fuji, the silver bracelet of the Nagara River where she swam as a child. Just here, the perfect solar arrays drinking sun.

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. If

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.

But what would it be to cast out into space creations that had no eyes to see it and no heart to fear or exult in it? For years an astronaut trains in pools and caves and submarines and simulators, every flaw or weakness located, tested and winnowed away until what’s left is a near-perfect unflappable triangulation of brain, limbs and senses. For some it comes hard and for others more easily. For Pietro, more easily; he is a natural-born astronaut, he has an equilibrium that has been there since childhood, an extraordinary ease and presence of mind that made him bypass most of the shit-slinging tantrums of toddler-dom and rebellions of adolescence. A deep curiosity,

a brain of ornate architecture, a focus, an optimism and a pragmatism; an astronaut to his bones before he even knew what an astronaut was. But a robot, no. There in his chest is a heart that tilts and pitches. He can keep its beats slow and smooth, quell its habits of fear or panic or impulse, stop it yearning too much for home, curb its unhelpful states of abandon. Calm and steady, calm and steady. Metronome pacing out the breath. Yet still at times it tilts and pitches. It wants what it wants and hopes what it hopes and needs what it needs and loves what it loves. So strenuously unrobotic is the astronaut’s heart that it leaves the earth’s atmosphere and it presses out – gravity stops pressing in and the counterweight of the heart starts

pressing out, as if suddenly aware it is part of an animal, alive and feeling. An animal that does not just bear witn...

For a split second Shaun thinks, what the hell am I doing here, in a tin can in a vacuum? A tinned man in a tin can. Four inches of titanium away from death. Not just death, obliterated non-existence.

Why would you do this? Trying to live where you can never thrive?

Trying...

where the universe doesn’t want you when there’s a perfectly good earth just there that does. He’s never sure if man’s lust for space is curiosity or ingratitude. If this weird hot longing makes him a hero ...

All well and fine, but he hadn’t been thinking then of the space-specification ready-to-eat macaroni cheese, which is neither good nor beautiful, nor made of anything that could ever possibly have had the will to live. He once tried to jazz it up with a bulb of fresh garlic that had come in the resupply vehicle. He heated some garlic cloves mixed with oil, in an old drinks sachet, thinking it would make an oily paste which he could drop into everything. But the sachet overheated and spilled and the oven, the galley, their sleeping quarters, the labs, smelled pungently of it for days, in fact weeks. In fact (since where do smells go in a sealed craft of infinitely recycled air) probably still does.

She took her mother to mean: look at those men landing on the moon, look at what’s possible given desire and belief and opportunity, and you have all of those if you want them, if they can do it you can do it, and by it I mean anything. Anything. Don’t squander a life so miraculously given, since I, your mother, could just as easily have been with my mother that day at the market if any number of tiny things had been different, and I would have been among the youngest of the victims of the atomic bomb and circumstance could have killed me and you would never have been born. But you were born, and here we are,

We have all been travelling, the crew thinks, travelling for years with barely a moment of settling; all of us living out of bags and borrowed places, hotels, space centres and training facilities, sleeping on friends’ sofas in midway cities between one training course and another. Living in caves and submarines and deserts to test our mettle. If we have any single thing in common it’s our acceptance of belonging nowhere and everywhere in order to reach this, this near-mythical craft. This last nationless, borderless outpost that strains against the tethers of biological life. What does a toilet have to do with anything? What use are diplomatic games on a spacecraft, locked into its orbit of tender indifference?

So then come discrepancies and gaps. They were warned in their training about the problem of dissonance. They were warned about what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth. You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You’ll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war.

But that he’d never be where she is because he’s a man who disappoints himself with his need of firm ground. He needs stability inside and out, and to simplify his life lest it overwhelm him. There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that

In five billion years when the earth is long dead, it’ll be a love song that outlives spent suns.

Wherever you are at night over the earth, there’s always somewhere the soft erratic pulse of lightning.

Space is the one remaining wilderness we have.

In the cosmic calendar of the universe and life, with the Big Bang happening on January 1st, almost fourteen billion years ago, when a supercharged universe-dense speck of energy blew open at the speed of faster-than-light and a thousand trillion degrees Celsius, an explosion that had to create the space it exploded into since there was no space, no something, no nothing, it was near the end

of January that the first galaxies were born, almost a whole month and a billion years of atoms moving in cosmic commotion until they began to flock bombshell-bright in furnaces of hydrogen and helium we now call stars, the stars themselves flocking into galaxies until, almost two billion years later on March 16th, one of these galaxies, the Milky Way, was formed, and a six-billion-year summer passed in routine havoc until, at the end of August, a shockwave from a supernova might have caused a slowly rotating solar nebula to collapse – who knows? – but in any case it did collapse and in its condensed centre a star formed that we call our sun, and around it a disc of planets, in some cosmic clumping thumping clashing banging Wild West shoot-out of rock

and gas and headlong combat of matter and gravity, and this is August. Four days later the earth came about, and a day after that its moon. September 14th, four billion years ago (or so some think) came life of sorts, some intrepid little single-celled things that invited themselves into existence in a moment of unthinking and didn’t know the holy mess they’d make, and two weeks later on September 30th some of these bacteria learned to absorb infrared and produce sulphates and a month after that the greatest feat of all, to absorb visible light and produce oxygen, our breathable l...

green algae which spawned in boundless fluorescence in the shallows of sunlit water, and on December 20th plants found their way to the land, liverworts and mosses, stemless and rootless but there nonetheless, then hot on their heels only thousands of years later the vascular plants, grasses, ferns, cacti, trees, the earth’s unbroken soil now root-snaked and tapped, plundered of moisture soon restocked by the clouds, looping systems of growth and rotting an...

Except of course the universe doesn’t end at the stroke of midnight. Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly

insensate to our preference for living. Guns us down. In another split second millennia will pass and the beings on earth have become

the cosmic calendar is in fact all of time, most of which has not yet occurred, in another two months any number of things could have happened to the cool marble of earth and none of them promising from a life point of view – a wandering star could throw the whole solar system out and earth with it, a meteor strike could cause mass extinction, the earth’s axial tilt could increase, the flexing and drifting of orbits could eventually eject some planets, and in all events it’ll be in roughly another four months, five billion years, that the sun will run out of fuel, expand to a red dwarf and consume

Mercury and Venus. Earth, if it survives, will be scorched and arid, its oceans boiled dry, a cinder stuck in an interminable orbit of a white dwarf black dwarf dying sun until the whole show ends as the orbit decays and the sun eats us

up. And this is just the local scene; a minor scuffle, a mini-drama. 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 w...

We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than...

I decided to be an astronaut when I was in the womb, Roman’s saying to a roomful of people. Before I was born, when I was taking in oxygen through an umbilical cord, when I was swimming weightless, when I knew infinity because I’d recently come from it, that’s when I decided to become an astronaut. And the people in the room start laughing and clapping as if he’s told a joke, when in fact he’s told the plainest truth he knows. All the same, he feels exceptionally

happy. His mother and father are in the room, clapping along, and behind them Anton.

They don’t know how it can be that their view is so endlessly repetitive and yet each time, every single time, newly born.

With each sunrise nothing is diminished or lost and every single one staggers them. Every single time that blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it, a momentary immaculate star, then spills its light like a pail upended, and floods the earth, every time night becomes day in a matter of a minute, every time the earth dips through space like a creature diving and finds another day, day after day after day from the depth of space, a day every ninety minutes, every day brand new and of infinite supply, it staggers them.