In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

diaphanous,

motile

abyssal

‘That’s amazing.’ Enthralled by the story, it still felt strange that this was coming from Fenna. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But that’s not all. Weeks after releasing their spawn, their bodies become soft and they disintegrate. They come apart in the same stream, saturating the water with nutrients so their young can grow fat on them.’

hadal

palazzo trousers.

I did have an Escher print on my wall growing up, but you probably think that’s tacky.’ ‘I always liked the one with the staircase going up and down—’ ‘That’s the one.’

Cassini oval,

spindrift

the single extant recording of Virginia Woolf speaking,

Ann Druyan’s

exuviae

hyoscine

The first stirring of a cell. Ascension: bodies rising and lifting off the ground, all of us airborne, all of us unlimited. We only look like we are rising when really we are falling.

insensate.

coruscating

psychotropic

ouroboros

that the food in the crew diet plan – our algae supplement – while bearing a certain similarity to the toxic substance dyeing the sea red and potentially acting as an ambient neurotoxin, was substantially different. And this food, as we had proven again and again in animal trials, though not yet through human consumption, was perfectly safe.

‘The US’s Kármán line,’ Karius points out. ‘Which is still a full 100 kilometres off the FAI’s definition. Plus, you could argue the thermosphere and exosphere are part of Earth as well, not true space at all, which puts the line at 30,000 klicks.’

Nereus.

diurnal

crepuscular

‘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. Fenna says my first word was ‘da’, that Geert liked to say I’d picked up English. But ‘da’, in my third language, means ‘there’ – a gesture, a directive, a hand that’s pointing. I prefer this reading. It’s there. Like the blank message sent from Voyager 1, a bare, empty fact. A world, a thing. It’s there. It can’t be, but it’s there.

‘It’s a cheat code for god, Tyler. Therefore there is no god.’

lacunae.

glioma.

lacuna.

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

She sees the tracks they’re trailing through the wet sand, and 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.

There’s green inside the blood, webbed lines reaching through.

The position of the algae is such that it appears to be reaching out from inside.

I dive into ultramarine, everything coming away, falling and dissembling, hair and skin leaving phosphorescent trail, everything blending, merging, fruit opening, a billion seeds, in this last moment the water is no longer lifeless but life-filled, and I’m glad, at the end, to be a part of this, intermediate in this, glad that everything I’ve seen and done, everything I’ve felt will be continuous in this, generative and fertile in this flux, cycles of transformation, not ending but beginning, beginning again, as it always was and will be, new worlds in transformation, new eternities, new life, new—