Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

die. It sounds like one lone long-lingering male, and perhaps she would linger that long if she’d been buried underground for fifteen years awaiting her turn to mate, but now his call isn’t one of mating but of soli...

In microgravity their arteries are thickening and stiffening and the muscle of the heart weakening and shrinking. Those hearts, so inflated with ecstasy at the spectacle of space, are at the same time withered by it. And when heart cells are damaged or depleted they don’t renew too well, so here they are, their own tender hearts waning and toughening while they

try to preserve the heart cells in their dishes.

The pink-purple-red configuration of cells was once the skin taken from human volunteers, the skin cells reverted back to stem cells, the stem cells into heart cells. The skin samples were taken from people of different ages, backgrounds, races. This is quietly astounding to Anton in a way it isn’t to his lab-mate, who treats them with a care free of reverence, the same care he gives to electrical wiring.

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.

Not encouraging thoughts, as Roman says. Anton asks him a while later if he worries about this. ...

No, Anton answers. Never.

kingly earth of old, a God-given clod too stout and stately to be able to move about the ballroom of space; no. 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 planet that’s been relegated out of the centre and into the sidelines

– the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for by its knobble of moon. This

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.

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.

companionship is our consolation for being trivial. And so,

in loneliness and curiosity and hope, humanity looks outwards and thinks they might be on Mars perhaps, the others, and sends out probes. But Mars appears to be a frozen desert of cracks and craters, so maybe in that case they’re in the neighbouring solar system, or the neighbouring galaxy, or the one after that.

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.

Maybe one day we’ll look in the mirror and be happy with the fair-to-middling upright ape that eyes us back, and we’ll gather our breath and think: OK, we’re alone, so be it. Maybe that day is coming soon. Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of decentring ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and wave-tossed of...

bouts of fascinated distraction, fall in love and in hate with ourselves, make a theatre, ...

Because what else is there? To become superb in our technology, knowledge and intellect, to itch with a desire for fulfilment that we can’t quite scratch; to look to the void (which still isn’t answering) and build spaceships anyway, and make countless circlings of our lonely planet, and little excursions to our lonely moon and think thoughts like these in weightless bafflement and routine awe. To turn back to the earth, which gleam...

there’s a backlash feeling, quiet and unshared but there in them all, of what has suddenly become their own mundaneness. The mundaneness of their earth-stuck orbit, bound for nowhere; their looping round and never out. Their loyal,

Irritating things: Tailgaters Tired children Wanting to go for a run

Whispering people

Chie clips her lists to the storage pouches in her sleeping quarters, where she puts her keepsakes,

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. 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, ...

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 foc...

There in his chest is a heart that tilts and pitches. He can keep its beats slow and s...

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 ...

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. ...

measuring the light that is reflected off the earth’s surface and the clouds. Whether the earth’s surface is dimming because the particulates in the air from pollutants reflect the sun’s light back into space, or brightening because the melting ice sheet and lessening high bright cloud mean that more of the sun’s light is absorbed by the earth. Or both at once, and then to what effect? This complex system of energy exchange which determines the temperature of the planet.

What they see is an unbroken vista of typhoon and a deep sucking well at its centre. A planet made entirely of spinning cloud.

So you stay. And you look up to the restless night sky where your unlikely astronaut friend spends his days, and emails you crazy photos of Samar, your island, in its turquoise seas. He would tell you to leave. Any minute now you’ll look at your phone and there’ll be a message from him telling you to leave. He’ll tell you he can get someone to arrange it if need be, get you a flight.

Your wife says guardedly, he is a kind man, and this is true. The kindest of men. Sends you money each month for your children’s school and has met you only that once, he on a diving trip (his honeymoon of all things) and you

on your fishing boat. You’d dropped your line-cutting knife and it sank in a moment, cost you ten dollars that knife and was good and sharp. Then up surfaced the astronaut and his wife who’d been diving among shoals a dolphin-leap away, and they saw you peering over the edge of your boat. Down they went for fifteen minutes and refused to come up until they’d found your knife, flatly refused. It’s alright, you’d said, by way of a raised...

Flee to where? It isn’t like that. You have your life and it can’t be moved.

Up ahead is the Terminator, that sharp boundary line between day and night that falls across

the full girth of th...

Michael Collins is the only human being not in that photograph, it is said, and this has always been a source of great enchantment. Every single other person currently in existence, to mankind’s knowledge, is contained in that image; only one is missing, he who made the image.

He imagines his father being very put out by this – that the only human presence in that photograph, the only life form in the universe, is American. He remembers then how his father would tell him stories about Russian

moon landings, looping, detailed, extravagant tales that he assumed, because his father told them, were true, but which of course were fables. How powerfully did those fables

impact him. When he asked his father if he, when he grew up, could be the next Russian to go to the moon, his father said yes, he could, he would, it was written in the stars. That on the moon’s surface, by the Russian flag, was a little box of Korovka, the milky sweet he liked, left by the last visiting ...

He can’t remember exactly when he realised that none of this was true – that no Russian had been to the

moon, that there was no flag and no Korovka.

Nell wants sometimes to ask Shaun how it is he can be an astronaut and believe in God, a Creationist God that is, but she knows what his answer would be. He’d ask how it is she can be an astronaut and not believe in God. They’d draw a blank. She’d point out of the port and starboard windows where the darkness is endless and ferocious. Where solar systems and galaxies are violently scattered. Where the field of view is so deep and multi-dimensional that the warp of

Look, she’d say. What made that but some heedless hurling beautiful force?

Is that all the difference there is between their views, then – a bit of heed? Is Shaun’s universe just the same as hers but made with care, to a design? Hers an occurrence of nature and his an artwork? The difference

seems both trivial and insurmountable.

It was an event, he says, a coming of age, I was ten or eleven and it was the first thing I did with my father and uncle like that, where they

seemed to be treating me as one of them. I didn’t like it. That’s the truth, I didn’t like it.