In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

The paradox again. 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.

I resisted being so easily explained, but I couldn’t help suspecting there was something in it. I wanted desperately for my life to be my own creation, to not have my present behaviour reduced to things that happened when I was young.

‘It’s not easy, you know, being a parent. I hope you know that. But I’m not just talking about families and children; I mean everyone. 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.’

While it should be possible to reach the inner rim of the cloud in under ten months using the new thrust design, travelling to the other side of it, beyond the solar system, would take decades.

The cloud was so enormous it was difficult to picture it having a beginning or an end. In my imagination it was like the universe itself. The area of eight planets circling the sun was a tiny marble in the centre of a massive drum. The drum was the cloud. We were effectively inside the cloud, the tiny lacunae at its centre.

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?

family is a group of strangers with a destructive desire for common nostalgia. We had privileged access to so much of each other’s life, our early life in particular, but I’m not sure we ever really knew what to do with that.