In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

‘Galaxy’ comes from the Ancient Greek for milk. People looked at the density of stars and saw birth, maternal sustenance scattered across the sky. A miracle, something over nothing.

All I want is to fall into water.

Maybe the algae, as we approach the heliopause, is expressing a form of regret, nostalgia: arcing backwards, turning itself towards Earth’s oceans, hydrotropic at 11 billion miles.

The whole inner system – the planets, the sun, the moons, the incalculable asteroids and micro debris – appears as a single curved body drifting through space. Like the juvenile stage of an aquatic life form. Was this all alive, on a completely non-appreciable scale? Was all this – 13 billion years – a brief beginning in a form that was yet to mature?

All my pictures, gone. My family, gone. Fenna is gone. Helena is gone. It’s like they never existed, my whole life a dream. And then I see a single photograph of Helena and me as children, printed from a disposable camera and affixed low on my cabin wall. We’re standing in the garden in winter sunlight, wearing gloves and scarves and identical sheepish grins. I remember the shutter falling, turning from the garden into the field and running, the warmth gaining in our breath, Helena trailing and laughing, reaching the grassy bank and collapsing together in the frosted turf, coughing, breathing heavily and looking up at the afternoon sky, the perfect moon and the sun about to descend.

Wow this is powerful

Datura’s carvings show cells interwoven, the beginning of a new phase of life, the era of the eukaryotes. Voyager shows the same cells 2 billion years later. Here is where you came from, here is where you are. Do you realise this? Are you waking up to this, and is it meaningful to you?

You’ll forget all this. One day, you’ll look back, you’ll be curious, but you won’t feel it from inside anymore – the pain. I promise. You’ll leave all this behind.’

Maybe it’s that having someone die in space clarifies the original process. It’s a miracle we’re born and a miracle we die. You see this anew in space.

Leigh had been nostalgic, determinedly sentimental; she never loved something so much as the moment it was gone. This was a cheaper, more contrived version of emotion, standing in for more difficult truths; amusingly, it had become Leigh’s legacy.

the original science-fiction story – the impossible adventure full of wonder and awe – was merely the existence of the species,

A family is a group of strangers with a destructive desire for common nostalgia.

It’s barely there, it’s practically still erupting. She can hear the strain of the suspended flow; it’s only loosely held together, this moment. It’s moving all the time, stretching and creaking, over and underland.

when whales rise out of the water to gather breath they incidentally collect images – terrestrial and astronomical markers – that become essential in their long migrations. Breath is an opportunity, and whales registering constellations is no more outlandish than the language we carve from air.

Like anyone who lived alone, a stream of hot drinks served as a kind of company, something to get up for and to sit down next to, something to do with your hands. A warmth. Walking into the room with the kettle boiling, as if someone else was there.

Soon the water’s at her shins. She stands in a field of white constellations breaking and re-forming every second.

as the falling wave reflects the moonlight sees, for a second, in perfect clarity, the curious, stately, ancient amphibious wisdom of 100-million-year-old eyes.

Cells produce the conditions essential for their own creation. Life is circular, atemporal. Every cell an instance of time travel.