In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

It was with surprise that, later, I wondered whether his actions, which I had always interpreted as sadistic, were really more about wanting us to enjoy ourselves, to go out and do things and experience the world. Our freedom was an affront to his confinement but work had also taught him that life could not be lived passively, it had to be seized and fought for. If he worked as hard as he did – sometimes he came in so stiff he could barely sit down, preferring to stand in doorways or with his back against the wall – then the least we could do was relish what he had given us, not waste away our days in bed.

I had always been fascinated by islands, and I recalled now Geert telling me how the Netherlands, as a military tactic, when the country was at risk of invasion, would release the gates and barriers, flooding the country and transforming it into an archipelago, the water level too high to wade through but too low to sail in, making it impervious to attack – using the country’s vulnerability as defensive strategy, as strength.

But archaea still exist. They’re drawn to inhospitable regions – Antarctic ice-sheets, the salt plains of Chile and Eritrea – but their most exotic site of all, arguably, is in our stomachs. Presumably they act symbiotically, and help us in some way. No one’s really sure. Among other strange characteristics, archaea have the ability to become dormant, and to reanimate after tens of thousands of years.

Why would we limit our designs to something a person can fit inside? You’re really cutting back on what you can do. If a person’s inside, you can’t take risks. A human is a soft part, and has to be protected. The really interesting places can’t accommodate a person. So it makes sense to cut out the vulnerable parts from a system.’

But can I let you in on a little secret?’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘Nobody really expects Scintilla to come back up from the vent – not from ultimate depths, assuming the vent’s as deep as people are saying. At least no one at JPL does. I wouldn’t be distraught, honestly. The ROVs and other kit will retrieve data. And we’ll bring Scintilla up from shallower depths – we’ll be careful with it. So it should, I imagine, still give us interesting footage and samples. But if we want to push it, push it as far as the vent reaches, then yeah, I wouldn’t put money on seeing it again.’

I tormented myself, picturing the quiet figure of the doctor who aids torturers by ensuring the victim is kept alive and conscious. This is horrible, masochistic, and I can’t really believe it. If one of the effects of Fenna retrieving me was that Geert was able, for longer, to continue beating me, then that still doesn’t void the love within the act.

The upper distances implied the gulf open beneath us, and as the stars were like punctures through darkness the vents such as the Atlantic crater and the Mariana Trench were similar holes cut in Earth’s crust, the light of distant stars and the light of Earth’s furnace, contrasting indications of a generally hidden illumination. Above us and below us this brilliant radiance.

The vent in the seafloor was an opportunity, a resting place but also a beginning, a folding back into the earth. Stefan’s death, as much as his life, was an act of creation. He was close to something now; I sensed it. I wanted it too. I remembered the compulsion I felt floating by the surface with my face pressed down into the glass of my mask. The golden light pulling me, a part of me, ecstatically. I couldn’t leave this. I knew the desire, and I wanted to return there.

On occasions, she started to smile or laugh. I was worried, once, she might even try to hug me. She looked at me – and I only thought about this after – with curious amazement, as if struck by the fact that I had emerged from her. This was too broad and shapeless a thought to do anything with – certainly we couldn’t speak about it. But she eyed me fondly, maybe with a kind of pride, realising she had never given herself enough credit for making this person.

The fact that this person could still be surprised by little things like this, someone considered to be old, seemed incongruous and unlikely, even absurd. She was still a child. We all were. This never changes, it never leaves us, this sense of beginning, of always beginning, of always being young.

I wanted someone, anyone – to stay awake and to miss me, having travelled all this way. The small routines I carried with me weren’t noted in their absence by anyone, and I regretted this. I moved from place to place – across a room, through a doorway, past a table – and I carried all this with me and it was not acknowledged.

Everyone should be missed when they are not right there with you because of what they carry, this very distinct way they have of bearing themselves that is like no one else and that is built by everything they have done and everything they have seen.

How far ultimately will the journey go, in thirteen months, at peak speeds? Will Earth remain visible at all times? The outer planets? Consult with Uria. Factor in first yield for time of possible Earth vanishing. Consult with psychologists on potential effects. Links to mirror-stage and child breaking free from bodily environment of mother. Astronauts as children.

And I suppose there was the idea that the plants, as they settled and grew, and flowered, would mimic in some way her own recovery, her confirmed good health. So that when we called, and her peace lilies and philodendron greens were flourishing, we’d know that Fenna was OK, that she was remembering them, feeding them, spending time with them and enjoying them.

This was when I saw the carvings. It took a moment to fully appreciate what this meant. My body began to tense and I felt a surge of internal electricity. The lines were huge, monumental; massive parallel ridges cut across the face, the largest, according to the appended notes, more than a kilometre wide. Fainter vertical lines intersected, giving the appearance of a grid. Grids suggest order, intentionality – a schema, a message, a map. On one augmentation a set of ovals was etched onto the surface, sixteen of them, their diameter ranging from 30 metres to 200 metres. The ovals’ ratios were similar to the object itself, as if each sketch represented the whole picture, a self-referential writing system. A language. It seemed possible – the digital enhancements couldn’t go any further – that each oval contained further grids and ovals, that the process of regression continued almost infinitely.

It was the feel of the object as I turned it over in my hand, the touch and shape of the egg. Stefan’s words came back, describing the crater as resembling a Cassini oval. Datura was oval, carved with repeated inscriptions of itself. They were connected. Datura had appeared five years ago, around the same time as the revelations that lead to the propulsion breakthrough. Reports claimed the engineers had had visions of orbs ‘spinning in a loop’. Could these have been ovals?

I remembered the dreams, fevers, and lost time on the ship. I remembered the words from the old Daturan narratives, looking forward thousands of years to our night sky, an impossible causal loop. And finally I heard Stefan’s voice on the ship, describing giant crater impacts fertilising and incubating early Earth, moulding the perfect conditions for animals to be born, to one day sleep, and dream, and build things on the earth.

Any sufficiently advanced technology will appear indistinguishable from magic.

From my apartment window I looked out onto a drifting grey illuminated by headlights. Long, deep horns sounded from bewildered traffic, like ancient, stranded ships. I bought new clothes, woollen sweaters, thicker socks. I ate warmer meals, vegetable soups, food that reminded me of family, of being young and at home and being cared for.

Coming in from outside, our hands were insensitive and we had to wait forty-five minutes before it was safe to handle instruments. We weren’t allowed to use heaters – danger of bruising the crop – but we could hold each other’s hands, an efficient loop, and somehow this way our cold dissipated quicker, our body heat spread together in the closeness.

we’d see whole ships grown entirely from organic materials, with the frame, the shielding, the interior, the air and water and food supply, the fuel, even the computing systems all grown and hewn from algae fundaments. New ships would be birthed, unfolding out of giant algal sacks on orbital farm stations. The recycling capacity – and so the cost savings – would be substantially greater than anything seen before, with each ship harvesting its own interior for fuel, the crew eating and drinking from the walls, taking the craft apart from the mid-part of the mission, corroding it by eating it, reducing weight costs for deceleration periods and re-entry. The crew would be travelling inside something that lived, that breathed out oxygen as if looking over them.

On longer journeys, as crew members died in greater numbers, bodies could be recycled into the food supply alongside placentas and waste – mythologies would spring up around these vessels, whose identity drifted somewhere between cities and gods.

A twitching of fingers, an arc of the neck. 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. I barely recognise the faces around me: I have never seen them as expressive, as exquisite, as this. So much of the face is ordinarily buried, only two or three times in a life falling into expression, into joy, like this. I am floating through the air, and I almost remember something.

A couple of minutes later, coming back and looking out over the space, I took a moment. I watched them in long shot, the three of them talking earnestly and silently on the far side. From this angle you couldn’t see the rocks, or any land at all, just guests in a raised glass box extending over the sea. The magic hour had gone, it was about to get dark, but the air was still blue, the sea clear behind them, and I felt almost protective, crushed as they were under the vast Pacific.

Tyler nodded forcefully, patting down the information, preserving it. It was consistent with his work – personality should be as sensible, as logical, as mechanical structure. He was looking for the detail that would unlock the mystery of a person, the thing that made them get up every day, do what they continued to do.

‘The hardest steps,’ Karl, my coach, told me from above, ‘will be the first you take back home.’ Earth will be hell, a home you cannot bear. Gravity crushes you, your body is diminished. You spend months in rehab just to relearn how to walk. You look out at people walking through 1-gravity and you cannot believe their ease, their nonchalance, their indifference to living in this place. ‘This,’ Karl said, ‘right here, right now – this is your chance to give a gift to your future self. Remember that. I guarantee you’ll look back on this moment at the end.’

I hit the far wall with my left knee first and the contact triggered a switch; light flooded the gymnasium and people were running towards me as I collapsed. Two hours sixteen minutes. I had lost 9lbs. The cleaners mopped it off the floor. I was put on a drip, the first days and nights a blur. My legs exploding with the warmth of their own undoing. I saw my mother standing at the foot of my bed, shushing me, laying her hands on me, pushing into me and giving me back a human shape. I’m crying and I miss her and I need her in the dark, and the revelation, as I come through this, is that she needs me too.

It hurt him so much to be in an unpredictable situation precisely because that was where he thrived. He would begin a process of simplification through classification and he would negotiate a corridor through it. He was addicted to it, energised by it, metabolising strangeness and novelty, turning the real world into waste material. Tyler would be the first person you would put in a combat zone or drop on an alien planet, his fear motivated by an inability to experience true wonder, allowing him to act where others might have fallen to their knees. He was like Columbus seeing the outline of the Americas and describing it in a way that suggests the plants of Europe.

Landing in a new world, he rejects it as impossible, denies it, and creates a doubled Spain instead. The attitude would be extremely practically useful. Tyler was someone you wanted up there, next to you. Whatever unimaginable events transpired, Tyler would hold, wouldn’t curl into a ball, head buried in his knees, rocking trauma.

He came here by accident. He’d never had any interest in space at all. He was a practical person. But it was obvious that he was a perfectionist and ultra-competitive and that he had ended up here because it wasn’t possible to go any higher.

He was careful to put things in terms I would recognise, his intentions probably good but rarely appreciated. Sometimes he surprised me. Some small, thoughtful gesture, proving that he had in fact been listening all along. Just little things. Forwarding a report based on something that I’d said. He didn’t have to do that. Tyler didn’t.

It didn’t fit his system. For Tyler, life developed in a line, intelligence mushrooming out with complexity, finding its culmination and purpose in ourselves, god’s chosen representatives on Earth. The slime-moulds challenged this. They proved formidable intelligence was in the system from the start. There didn’t seem a way out of this, short of overhauling everything he believed, and he wasn’t about to do that.

For three days he barely touched his food. He’d heard the rumours about Endeavour. He was superstitious, fearful. So, at the end of Sim 1, I drove him and K to China Lake, and had Lin and James show them round, take them through the process from beginning to end. Soon after, he seemed his usual self again. I empathised, to an extent; the horror he registered, at eating something to sustain you that is itself capable of drawing a route towards the nearest star.

Generally, guiltily, I trusted that if I didn’t hear from or about our mother, then at least nothing had gone seriously wrong. With a child’s logic, I reasoned that if a message couldn’t reach me, its potential content could never be realised.

Writing to Fenna never worked. At the most you got two curt, clipped lines back. She just wasn’t very comfortable with words. I thought about this during training; maybe this, unconsciously, was one of the things that drew me to Uria. Same age as my mother, comically opposite, fluent in nine languages while Fenna’s silence fanned out further all the time. Once, on an endorphin high post-workout, I described the situation to my crewmates. The next morning I woke at dawn, and pursued every single way my words might come back at me.

One beautiful day, under a ridged sky, Amy took us outside to a field in Pasadena. We practised walking over the uneven ground, through the distorted colours and unfamiliar angles of the faceplate. Bystanders took us for biosecurity, walked straight past. We went slowly, awkwardly, animals newly released in birth; estranged, limbs buckling, shivering, shocked by atmosphere, startled by and unprepared for life.

I laughed. ‘It’s good hearing you again, Helena.’ ‘You too, Leigh.’ Keys tapped, her computer chirped. ‘Ugh, I know this is lame . . . don’t go yet . . . I know we never say this, and I promise again nothing’s wrong, but I just wanted to say I love you, and Mum—’ ‘You’re sure you’re not drinking?’ ‘Come on.’ ‘We do too. Same back.’ ‘Same back?! Helena, are you listening?’ ‘I’m listening!’ ‘OK. I’ll let you go. I can’t wait to see you again, some day.’

Some folk, you know, they say we have a death-wish.’ ‘Come on. You believe that?’ He shrugged. ‘Space travel and dying are the only two ways of leaving the earth.’ ‘I’d dispute that.’ ‘What?’ ‘That death means leaving the earth.’

The power, as we attempt and fail to observe it, resists us like it is itself alive. Life is not necessarily carried in a body. And what is a body, in the loosest terms, but a set of agreements among matter and energy that endures for a period and exhibits a metabolic response?

Historically NASA gets the most photogenic staff out and puts them in the wide glass-fronted offices broadcast live. Something like half the people standing and wiping down their brows and hugging each other in shirtsleeves as the rockets launch are secretaries, junior staff, relatives of directors. The offices are literally a front. The real work goes on behind. The people who built the ship and work with the crew and listen to their quickened breath are in no fit state to be recorded. They are worried about their friends. They are studying in great detail every one of the tens of thousands of malfunctions that could bring the ship down over the Atlantic.

Control are distant during the final stages. Even Mawson withdraws; he can’t bear to talk to us. They shouldn’t be aware of the softness, the pliability, of a person. It will affect decision-making, hurt general performance. They may lose focus, become emotional, and that is not optimal. They shouldn’t smell us or watch us eat or hear us rehearse our nightmares in the grinding of our teeth, knowing that at the climax of the journey we’ll be subject to speeds approaching 32 million miles per hour.

Though Uria claimed it was a coincidence, saying the design was functional, it seems likely the ship is modelled in some way on Datura. The two spherical units – the mid-deck and the re-entry capsule – are lined up against each other, not quite overlapping. With the garden as a buffer separating them, either sphere is effectively turned into an oval. Ovals have recurred through the history of our contact with Datura, and modelling our ship on this form seems an implicit way of signalling, at the very least, that we have intercepted the contact, and are attempting to respond.

Everything that happens is absorbed and processed in the ship, including the diurnal tides of heat and coolness expressed by the wiring, and the heavy and intenser communication periods, when the antennas transfer messages to and from the ship and home planet. The waste we expunge is filtered and scrubbed, fed back into the walls, into the drinking water, into the oxygen and the solution we’ll use to feed the algae in the garden: a perfectly circular system.

We hugged awkwardly in suits, before retreating and shutting ourselves away in our berths. If this was the end, I thought, then I’d barely approached it, I stood far back from it. Even if we did make it through, who knew what condition we’d be in. Would we still be ourselves, in any way that we recognised? Would Control still understand us, after our exposure to the power? And if not ourselves, then who, or what, would we have become?

From the first transmission I was absorbed by every detail Uria described. Earth was inexpressibly exotic. I wanted to know every single thing about Florida. I tried interrupting, asking her to tell me more – the sound of raindrops bouncing off the roof, the first folds of colour in the sky, steam rising from the forest verges as the storm begins to fade – but I was still learning to work with the delay, and we clashed, spoke over each other. Silence, confusion, failed attempts to backtrack – we stumbled on.

Given my background in life sciences, and the fact that I was testing and sending back reports, I was the one they came to first. I described our various responses as falling into two categories: conscious and automatic. The former was sentimental: you looked towards the fading planet and felt desperately sad. You regretted the mission, wanted to go back, to step on the ground, breathe unfiltered air and stand under a sky again. Control weren’t so interested in this: it was the instinctive, automatic responses they asked about.

The planet’s ammonia yellow hue lights the mid-deck and strikes our faces. The discs have sublime geometry, the first truly perfect objects I have ever seen. I smell my tears before I feel them moving down my face, the novel saline intensity.

But then I remember the travel embargo. Unless Maria travels to see her – and for some reason this doesn’t seem permitted – Uria will miss the pregnancy; she’ll miss most of the first year of her grandchild’s life. I feel a sense of shame, and in that moment Nereus’s mission, our nineteen-month voyage, seems insignificant. We should never have left. If it means that only one woman could be there for her daughter, we should never have left the ground.

For us, and for Uria, and maybe for Maria and her partner, the child would be defined by the mission. Ontogeny and flight plan converge: first limb buds unfolding on the pass across the Kuiper belt; neural cells cascading through escape from the heliopause; birth, at the end, as we hit terminus, alighting on Voyager 1 at the edge of the Oort cloud.

Where earlier we’d grown apart, our stats now started to converge: sleep length, pulse, temperature and metabolic rate. It was as if we were becoming a unified prototype astronaut, that as no one individual was equipped to survive this, we had amassed ourselves into something greater. We shared the same flora. Our microbiomes were the next substantial life on the ship, more diverse than the crops in the garden.