In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

One Sunday afternoon when I was five years old my spade sliced through the sand and clanged against the concrete underneath. The impact fizzed across my nerves, leaving me light-headed. It wasn’t real. I will never forget the look of horror my father directed at me. I’d ruined something, the look said. I’d pierced the illusion and now I had to pay.

shy, withdrawn child, who rarely spoke unprompted and who was so accustomed to positioning herself around a book – hands gripping it, eyes gazing at it, knees raised in support of it – that she seemed incomplete without one.

On one spine was an infinity symbol, two loops running into each other endlessly, with no accompanying title. I couldn’t see what she did all day, couldn’t imagine what she thought of all her life. If Fenna could speak the language that she thought in, the sound would be like nothing in the world.

It was like my full adult shape had been prepared, condensed, knotted into a fine ball at birth and left to slowly open out.

The platonic bomb within

if animals were shaded out, and microorganisms illuminated, then our ghosts would be clear in these bright peripheries. My favourite species were those that lay dormant in husk form before reanimating, such as the rotifers discovered in Arctic ice-sheets after 24,000 lifeless years. Able to withstand almost any force, they seemed to challenge the distinction between life and death, annihilating the concept of straight and linear time to suggest something more circular and repetitious instead.

On the walk back I smelled the sulphur from the geysers, white steam twisting skyward. Farmers baked meats in scald-pits, carcasses infused with the scent and the feel of the burned-up inner rock. They were prize items for cruise-ship passengers shuttled in on yachts from the larger islands. I was fascinated by the sickening smell – rot, flesh – and by the sight of the charred meat slabs being delivered from the vents. I imagined that the flesh had always been there, burning in the lower earth, and was only now being excavated, eaten like the ritual consumption of a god.

The sea, she said, was a sort of intermediate stage for the subs, whose utility was off-world. ‘The past few years there’s been an explosion of funding. It’s changed everything, in terms of what we might do. Every major space agency has essentially torn up its twenty-year forecasts. We can go further now. Much further. And it’s realistic to think we can start doing so pretty soon. Saturn’s moons are a feasible target. If I tell you Europa’s seas are 100 miles thick, you’ll get an idea of why we’re interested in vents.’

‘I’ve no experience with crewed subs, that’s something else entirely, I’m afraid. That’s vanity. Why would we limit our designs to something a person can fit inside?

I said I studied algae, but this was not dry land and this was not an ordinary group of people, so I went further, explaining how algae was a false term, how it covered a huge range of organisms, from giant forest kelp to beach-weed to single cyanobacteria cells, some of which were as closely related to us as to each other.

‘This is why you’re interested in cell development?’ ‘The cell is basically an ocean capsule. A preserved primordial capsule, holding the original marine environment inside. This is . . . this is just beyond incredible, isn’t it? I mean, you could describe us as both people, and as mobile assemblages of ocean. I am not ready to get over this.’ Stefan gave a quiet laugh. ‘It’s what we’re hearing now, sloshing beneath us as the ship goes through it. It’s a mistake to think of our origins, of all life’s origins, as belonging only to the past. It’s still there.’

As a general rule, you couldn’t learn anything radically new, rate of progress capped from the start by inertia, inability to recognise anything past the limits of present imagination. You could only see, essentially, the world as you already knew it.

Everyone is a parent. That’s what getting old is: catastrophic senescence. That’s what dying is. You become a parent. You fall into the stream.’

all of us have extremophile archaea in our lower gut, kin to the species more than 10 kilometres below us.

‘They always wanted kids,’ she said. ‘But not here. Not now. Reproduction is quite a lot lower than official figures, you know? Who could blame them. But at the same time it’s sad, isn’t it; it’s awful. To decide, en masse, that we do not want more of this.’

So many times I had identified errors – in my work and in my relationships – stemming from the original mistake of too many assumptions, of predicting rather than perceiving the world and seeing something that wasn’t really there. I noticed this more as I got older. Age was, among so many other things, the realisation that you couldn’t correct this, that the pursuit wasn’t meaningful, there was no perfect clean reality on the other side. You’re flawed, and the world you see corresponds to these flaws.

We could approach things differently, our bodies being rare deep objects on Nereus. Train our depth fields on each other, explore this inner space. The eyes as windows to the soul; every person a galaxy, a universe. But we don’t. We’re cynical. Instead of using ourselves to bring depth onto the ship, to furl out the interior of Nereus, we hide ourselves away.

We’re beginning to sleep at separate times. Within the single space available to us, we’re moving increasingly further apart.

‘Galaxy’ comes from the Ancient Greek for milk. People looked at the density of stars and saw birth, maternal sustenance scattered across the sky.

If she believed in such things she might say this was a pathology developed by the species to protect itself, turning away from an increasingly insupportable reality into denial and hallucination.

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

Breath is an opportunity, and whales registering constellations is no more outlandish than the language we carve from air.