Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

vertical stacks that have formed a typhoon.

four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (Russian, Russian); two women, four men, one space station made up of seventeen connecting modules, seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They

They will each be here for nine months or so, nine months of this weightless drifting,

to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.

Today is his four hundredth and thirty-fourth day in space, a tally arrived at over three different missions.

Of this mission it’s day eighty-eight. In

Space shreds time to pieces. 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 this matter. 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 ...

Look often at your watch to anchor your mind, tell yourself when you wake up: this is the morning of a new day.

And so it is. But it’s a day of five continents and of autumn and spring, glaciers and deserts, wildernesses and warzones. In

There was a lesson at school about the painting Las Meninas, when Shaun was fifteen. It was about how the painting disoriented its viewer and left them not knowing what it was they were looking at.

It’s a painting inside a painting, his teacher had said – look closely. Look here. Velázquez, the artist, is in the painting, at his easel, painting a painting, and what he’s painting is the king and queen, but they’re outside of the painting, where we are, looking in, and the only way we know they’re there is because we can see their reflection in a mirror directly in

Las Meninas, ‘The Ladies-in-Waiting’.

Or, is the subject art itself (which is a set of illusions and tricks and artifices within life), or life itself (which is a set of illusions and tricks and artifices within a consciousness that is trying to understand life through perceptions and dreams and art)?

Or – the teacher said – is it just a painting about nothing? Just a room with some people in it and a mirror?

The girl sitting next to him saw those doodles and nudged him and raised her brow and smiled, a small fugitive smile, and when she became his wife many years later she gave him a postcard of Las Meninas, it being,

to her, an emblem of their first real exchange. And when, years after that, he was away in Russia preparing to go into space, she wrote in a cramped hand on the back of the postcard a précis of everything their teacher had said, which he’d entirely forgotten but which she’d remembered with a lucidity that didn’t surprise him, because she was the sharpest and most lucid human he’d met.

They look down and they understand why it’s called Mother Earth.

Chie came to the galley on Friday evening

My mother has died. And

Chie has been made an orphan, her father dead a decade. That ball is the only thing she can point to now that has given her life. There’s no life without it. Without that planet there’s no life. Obvious.

Think a new thought, they sometimes tell themselves. The thoughts you have in orbit are so grandiose and old. Think a new one, a completely fresh unthought one.

For today a crew of four is on its way to the moon and has just surpassed the space station’s shallow orbiting distance of two hundred and fifty miles above the planet. The

Without that hefting and sweating and pressing she would survive the blazing heat and tumble of her re-entry only to be pulled from her capsule and fold like a paper crane.

At some point in their stay in orbit there comes for each of them a powerful desire

that sets in – a desire neve...

At first on their missions they each miss their families, sometimes so much that it seems to scrape out their insides; now, out of necessity, they’ve come to see that their family is this one here, these others who know the things they know and see the things they see, with whom they need no words of explanation.

When they get back how will they even begin to say what happened to them, who and what they were? They want no view except this view from the window of the solar arrays as they taper into emptiness.

They cling to their twenty-four-hour clock because it’s all the feeble little time-bound body knows – sleep and bowels and all that is leashed to it.

If she could stay in orbit for the rest of her life all would be well. It’s only when she goes back that her mother is dead; as in musical chairs when there’s one fewer seat than there are humans who need it, but so long as the music plays the number of seats is immaterial and everyone is still in the game. You have to not stop. You have to keep moving. You have this glorious orbit and when you’re orbiting you’re impact-proof and nothing can touch you. When the planet is galloping through space and you gallop after it through light and dark with your time-drunk brain, nothing can end. There could be no end, there can be only circles.

On this orbit, orbit two of today’s sixteen, they

Pietro will go and monitor his microbes that tell them something more about the viruses, funguses and bacteria that are present on the craft. Chie will continue growing her protein crystals, and attach herself to the MRI to have one of many routine brain scans that show the impact of microgravity on their neural functioning. Shaun will monitor his thale cress to see what happens to plant roots when they lack the gravity and light to know when and how to grow. Chie

and Nell will check the well-being of and collect data for their forty resident mice who are enlightening them about muscle wastage in space, and later Shaun and Nell will conduct experiments on flammability. Roman and Anton will service the Russian oxygen generator and culture heart cells. Anton will water his cabbages and his dwarf wheat. They will all report on whether they have headaches and where in the head and how acute. They will all at some point take their cameras to the earth-viewing windows and photograph each of the locations on the list they’ve been given, in particular those Of Extra-Special Interest. They will: change the smoke detectors, change out

Water Resupply Tank in slot 2 and install a new tank in slot 3 of the Water Storage System, clean the bathroom and kitchen, fix the toilet-that-always-breaks. Their day is mapped by acronyms, MOP...

Today there is one item on the Of Extra-Special Interest list above all others, the typhoon moving over the Western Pacific towards Indonesia and the Philippines,...

Earlier that morning Nell had an email from her brother saying he was unwell with the flu, and that struck her, how long it has been since she was ill – she feels in space as though her body is young again and there are no aches or pains, except for the space headaches they all get – even those are rare for her. Something

about having your weight taken off you, having no pressure on your joints and no pressure on your mind – no choices. Your days are laid out minute by minute in a schedule. You do someone else’s bidding and you go to bed early and usually exhausted and you get up early and start again and the only decision to be made is what to eat, and that too is limited.

This is a strange thing, it seems to her. All your dreams of adventure and freedom and discovery culminate in the aspiration to become an astronaut, and then you get up here and you are trapped, and spend your days packing and unpacking things, and fiddle in a laboratory with pea shoots and cotton roots, and go nowhere but round and round with the same old thoughts going round and round with you.

There is that idea of a floating family, but in some ways they’re not really a family at all – they’re both much more and much less than that.

Some days they just want to walk, or lie down. When they miss people and things, when earth feels so far away that depression washes over them for days and even the view of the sun setting over the Arctic isn’t enough to lift them, then they have to be able to see the face of one of the others on board and find something there that keeps them going. Some solace.

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.

all beings are living in life-support

machines commonly called bodies and all of these will fail eventually.

This one, precarious though it surely is, is limited to its orbiting groove, a place of few surprises, all unforeseens foreseen – watched twenty-four seven, assiduously monitored, obsessively repaired, comprehensively alarmed, thoughtfully padded, few sharp objects, no trip hazards, nothing to fall off. Not the multiple perils of earthly freedom where you roam about quite unmonitored, quite unbounded, beset by ledges and heights and roads and guns ...

What a stupefyingly ill-prepared thing his body is to dry up. Like

The woman lies on one of the narrow steps, she is narrow too, a broomstick is how she sees herself. All this woodenness around her and no human beings, so she has turned to wood so as not to be outdone.

To die on her daughter’s arrival on earth. Her extremities feel suddenly hot, like her heart is trying to send the blood away from itself. Let me rest, her heart is saying. She hears a cicada, never before would you hear a cicada this late in the year, it’s so warm now all the time that they don’t know when

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