Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.

Do you know what I’ll look forward to getting back to, when the time comes? he says. Things I don’t need, that’s what. Pointlessness. Some pointless ornament on a shelf. A rug.

This thing that harbours we humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are.

Maybe human civilisation is like a single life – we grow out of the royalty of childhood into supreme normality; we find out about our own unspecialness and in a flush of innocence we feel quite glad – if we’re not special then we might not be alone. If there are who-knows-how-many solar systems just like ours, with who-knows-how-many planets, one of those planets is surely inhabited, and companionship is our consolation for being trivial.

We send out the Voyager probes into interstellar space in a big-hearted fanciful spasm of hope.

decentring ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and wave-tossed offering of peace.

Is that all the difference there is between their views, then – a bit of heed? Is Shaun’s universe just the same as hers but made with care, to a design? Hers an occurrence of nature and his an artwork? The difference seems both trivial and insurmountable.

Because of ongoing political disputes please use your own national toilet. The idea of a national toilet has caused some amusement among the crew. I’m just going to take a national pee, Shaun will say. Or Roman: Guys, I’m going to go and do one for Russia.

And us? We are one. For now at least, we are one. Everything we have up here is only what we reuse and share. We can’t be divided, this is the truth. We won’t be because we can’t be. We drink each other’s recycled urine. We breathe each other’s recycled air.

We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf.

Aren’t we so insecure a species that we’re forever gazing at ourselves and trying to ascertain what makes us different.