In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

It’s all there – the sea, the mysterious woman, the chance encounter that transforms two lives. The fact that cliché is the only way I have found to talk about it is, I think, proof of just how inexplicable and unjustifiable – and how much of a mistake – their union was.

Maybe that explained why Fenna could never confront him, could never challenge him about the violence: if she condemned him then she also condemned all the happiness they’d enjoyed, and however much she regretted the pain he caused us – a pain she clearly experienced herself, in her migraines – she just couldn’t bring herself in all conscience to do this.

Prediction was fundamental – forecasting annual water levels, gauging the severity of an upcoming storm, deciding in advance whether to call for the evacuation of an area – but the further we moved into the twenty-first century, the harder this became. Temperature fluctuated abnormally, the seasons overlapped dramatically, and flooding became an issue throughout the year. Months’ worth of rain fell in a single day. Enormous breakers hurled themselves against the sea walls and the bulwarks and the artificial coastal barriers that Geert and his colleagues had erected. What had always been a difficult job quickly became impossible.

When he arrived home in the evening he was slow, ponderous, almost shocked. He had no idea what the next day would bring; he could no longer picture what would happen. It must have terrified him. The whole ecosystem was changing and he couldn’t keep up. The smallest detail could effect the wildest change. Mosquitoes would colonise the landscape. Excess salt inland would ruin agriculture. But this was only the beginning. When he looked outside, I thought, he could see only the end of the world.

Against his wishes, new automated storm barriers were installed, an artificially intelligent system that communicated with satellite data and erected defences whenever flooding threatened. The lives of over 2 million people depended on this inscrutable intelligence, and at this, Geert finally broke.

There was no gap separating my body from the living world. I was pressed against a teeming immensity, every cubic millimetre of water densely filled with living stuff. These organisms were so small I couldn’t see them, but somehow I felt their presence, their fraternity, all around me. I didn’t look through the water towards life, I looked directly into water-life, a vast patchwork supporting my body, streaming into my nostrils, my ears, the small breaks and crevices in my skin, swirling through my hair and entering the same eyes that observed it. In what felt like minutes, but must have been only seconds, I saw a completely different world, a place of significance and complexity, an almost infinite number of independent organisms among which I floated like a net, scooping up untold creatures with every minor shift and undulation of my body.

I ate quickly and ravenously and drank three bottles of wheat beer before leaving the café and trailing across the central plaza towards the guest-house. I had the impression, again, of difference, a certainty not only that something had changed, but that this change was being demonstrated, was being lived, all around me. I wondered if I was witnessing the beginning of a festival, the quiet early stages when everything is still being set up. I could see no costumes, no stalls, and while the streets were busier, these were hardly crowds. And yet I could feel it, palpably – something new was taking place right now. Standing there, I tried to pinpoint exactly what it was, but I couldn’t see it. Enjoy it, I told myself. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Enjoy it for the feeling itself.

Sitting by the runway-facing window, I heard my phone ping with an alert from the airport Wi-Fi, and I logged in. It was the lead story everywhere. More details would be released later, and the initial announcement was brief: NASA engineers had made a radical breakthrough in propulsion technology. There were rumours that spacecraft could achieve more than 10,000 times their previous velocity. For now, the Scientific Council said it was confident ‘major applications’ would be found in the coming years. Researchers were setting up larger trials, and it was already being described as one of the most significant engineering advances in history. The details were vague, but it had to be nuclear based, surely. Had they finally produced scalable, safe fusion?

A week in, and I was finally striking up conversations and learning a little more about the trip. Endeavour was part-funded by groups who wanted to mine and dredge the seafloor. If this compromised the expedition, it wasn’t exactly a shock – corporate sponsorship always seemed to lurk in the small print, and ISA had been authorising seafloor surveys for years. Regardless of what we found, permits were unlikely to be given out for some time yet – or so I hoped.

Most people agreed that ocean vents were life’s beginning. At their base, archaea – the ancients – feasted on methane and sulphur, converting gases into sugars and founding the food chain. The archaea – small, structurally simple, distinct from bacteria – were some of the first living things, appearing 3 or 4 billion years ago in a chaotic era of mass volcanic eruptions. At some point long after this, something even more radical happened, and archaea grouped with bacteria to form a new kind of cell, containing a nucleus. All multicellular life – plants, fungi, animals – come from this.

She took a sip from her wine, and seemed to contemplate it. I watched her run her tongue across her lips, feeling the burn on my face again. ‘Look, it’s fraught with paradoxes. First, you need to decide whether the vehicle should be remote operated or autonomous. Obviously the first’s easier, quicker to build, and if there’s a visual feed it’s an advantage if you can move it around. But there’s a limit to what you can do with ROVs, and where you can put them. At extreme depths, they basically shut down – comms fail, and because they’re not autonomous, the thing just sits there. Comms are one of the first things to go – another soft part, if you like. So ROVs are great for shallower areas, but not so great on a trip like this. And useless in Europa’s 100-mile seafloors.’ ‘So you built something autonomous?’ ‘We tried. There are various stages between ROV and automated. The quickest useful thing to build – useful for getting started – is a vehicle with a route programmed into it. So, for example, you direct it to explore the seabed in a zig-zag motion for 150 metres.’ ‘So it isn’t actually autonomous.’ ‘It’s controlled externally, remotely, it’s just that the instructions are coded in a bit earlier, so it doesn’t have to rely on a volatile feed.’

‘The paradox! But again, we trialled these vehicles at shallower depths, which helped us batter out improvements. Later, with more autonomous systems, we found similar problems. The core system isn’t so different from self-driving cars; you train it using images which it learns to recognise. Paradox again: we can do our best to create conditions that resemble what we think is down there, but without going there it’s basically a guess. I wouldn’t look too worried, Leigh. There are various fail-safes built in. We also have ROVs that we can use as support or retrieval vehicles. 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.’

Rather than getting divers in – too expensive, too laborious, and anyway the obstruction was likely much too deep – investigators leased an orbiting satellite for a new depth reading. The results came back at 12 kilometres, as deep as any vent in the world. Which of course didn’t make sense – the Atlantic was widely charted. Previous surveys had put the area at between 3 and 4 kilometres. There had been tectonic activity here around three years previously, but of nothing like the kind required to gouge out such an enormous depression. The vent must have existed earlier – so why hadn’t anyone seen it?

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 dwelled on this as I waited out on deck, watching the activity. I questioned what else I had already missed so far, in my own life, simply through the limits of my character. If we were blind to anything representing a new category, then our individual histories might have amounted to a series of glancing encounters with unspeakable wonders – as a general summation, it felt about right. Life as a repeated failure to apprehend something. Coming close then veering away again, sensing this unnameable category, music heard distantly through a series of doors, a dull, echoing bass, a sound hitting your body.

‘It changes everything! This could revolutionise cellular theory. I have so many questions! How deep is it really? What is in there? And how rare is the site? Could there even be a whole class of “super-vents” that we are yet to discover, or have we stumbled upon a truly exceptional phenomenon? We know almost nothing about sub-abyssal depths, and I’ve been thinking: what if this place is the remains of a truly ancient site? The legacy, perhaps, of an extraordinary cataclysmic impact millions, even billions of years ago? Could we be in contact, essentially, with a location of singular importance in the history of life on the planet? A cradle, a garden?’

‘Well you mentioned first life, so let’s take panspermia. It’s just . . . unimaginative as a theory, you know?’ ‘You’re saying I’m unimaginative, Leigh?’ ‘No! I’m saying panspermia is. It’s boring. Why do people want to believe life came from somewhere else? Why are they so insistent on that? Like it’s supposed to be romantic? Why couldn’t life have begun here all along? Like we were saying the other night, Stefan – life is already alien, is already rich and strange – we don’t need to say it arrived seeded on a meteor to make it more so.’

It didn’t feel any different. But no one had gone into the water yet; I hadn’t actually realised this until Felix mentioned it in the kitchen while we were preparing breakfast. The longer we left it, the more stigma was attached. It was surprising how quickly a group of experienced professionals could develop something like superstition, and it was fascinating to watch. Whatever reasonable objections people raised – higher aluminium levels, a possible toxic run-off from the minerals – underneath it was a simpler, older, baser fear. It wasn’t just that the area below us was unknown, it was that it appeared to be resisting us. Our measurements were blocked. We were repeatedly pulled back. Very early in the process – perhaps from the start, with the original theory of a mineral layer concealing the scope of the vent – people had assigned it agency, will. Whatever it was, overnight it was pushing Endeavour away.

I still couldn’t remember everything. After falling backwards from the zodiac the water had enveloped me as an oddly neutral medium: no odour, no temperature, and with my bodysuit extending over my fingertips it made no direct impression on my body at all. I was untouched. The moment had a kind of hyper-reality. Because it felt as if I wasn’t wearing a suit at all, and yet the sea had no effect on me, my brain made the decision that I wasn’t actually in the water, I was watching myself in a film or a dream. Sealed off from the water while immersed in it, I almost had to take it on trust that I was really there. I looked out at it remotely, through a lens. The experience was uncanny, with something of the vivid irreality I’d noted in my childhood during episodes of shock. I was there and not there. I swam through the sunlight layer at the same time as I looked back on myself from some unknown, uncertain future point.

I lost myself into a wide, vast warmth, a wholly enveloping medium. Suddenly the sea was bright with colour, as life surged: a purple and yellow sea lily uncrushed itself, pushing away water in a spray; red-tipped tubeworms undulated successively like the drift of a breeze over a wheat field, a thought unfurling across a bed of neurons; jets of bio-light glowed and pulsed, as outlines of animals burst in rapturous communication then disappeared again into the darkness; transparent cephalopods hung suspended in an immensity; bacterial symbionts draining and nourishing everything; archaea under it, at the heart of it, crawling, synthesising, stretching back, inexpressible return—

I took a breath and swam onwards, limbs tightening on every stroke, the ship holding a single shape, a static distance. I swallowed more water, pushing desperately on, lungs heaving. Endeavour came into focus at last. When I reached it I hung on the surface, floating gently in the swell. Even this close, the ship looked different, two-dimensional, as if painted onto water. I couldn’t believe we lived in this place. Several figures bobbed around it – Stefan and the other divers. They were lying forward with their faces planted in the water, fascinated, limbs splayed like stars.

I looked into imagined depths, the base of the vent broiling with archaea and bacteria, churning through the gases emitted by the opened earth, a cycle of transformation beginning. The possibility of life, mineral into organic, objects creating themselves in a frenzy of feeling, striving not to end, briefly distinct from what surrounds them before coming apart again, back into disparate chemicals. I took a breath, felt a stabbing in my abdomen: anxiety, indigestion, the trailing memory of the illness picked up in the water. I clutched at the pain, grasping myself, and looked back, turning away from the edge and towards the ship, the low roofs of the decks, the clip of the neat doors closing onto snug cabins. I flashed the rest of the dive team an OK sign, kicked backwards from the stern, tumbled into the water.

While the water continued to pull me in, I was drawn, equally involuntarily, to my past. I returned to the ocean, as I returned to my childhood in Rotterdam, to Geert’s inexplicable beatings and to the nights following when Fenna mended me, kneaded me, and ushered me back as best she could. I looked back on the events as if they’d happened to another person, pitying this character as I would a stranger. But if she was a stranger, she’d still shaped the person I’d become. I didn’t want to think about this connection to her, didn’t want to admit it, sitting out on my towel in the sunshine.

They were, in a sense, the physical constituents accompanying and embodying that earlier drama, my nine-year-old self hugging her cramping stomach the day after a beating. But they were more than that – their purpose was infinitely variable, they were the source, I thought, of joy and exhilaration as much as they were terror, pain. They were the source of everything, inside us and beyond us, before us and long after we were succeeded. While I studied it, I had to admit I was entangled in it too. It couldn’t be otherwise – I came from it. And as part of this honesty I might have to face that my mind – my ‘character’, as I might call it, which I still willed in some naive way as my own creation, an infinitely regressive loop – was not separate and cut off either. Entangled in its thicket, I looked into the water with eyes that were born there, several billion years before. This challenged me, reduced me and provoked me, but it also instilled in me a desire to keep going, to keep pushing, to continue this exploration just as far as I could take it, across the remainder of my conscious days.

‘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.’ ‘Like cannibalism?’ ‘I suppose it is, indirectly.’ She smiled. ‘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.’

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.

Dana knew when I was flying and she hadn’t messaged. No one had. The time at home was 06:00. I wanted her – 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 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. When that goes – even just a little way, through the doorway, the other side of the wall, even while you can still hear the movement taking place – it should be missed. It should be startling, when we travel, when we are there and then not there. Travelling is a reminder that every thought it is possible to conceive of exists on a material plane and that it is there and then not there and that fact is extraordinary, and unbearable.

Though I’d tried, it wasn’t easy to get information on my new employer. ICORS – Institute for Coordinated Research in Space – was set up to exploit the propulsion breakthrough and accelerate progress. Rather than a half-dozen agencies hatching broadly similar plans, a single, unified programme could streamline resources and bypass the usual governmental checks and restraints, and in theory get missions off the ground much quicker. There were three main bases – California, Beijing, Moscow – and though it sounded unlikely, press releases insisted they were in step with one another, working to apply the new technology and launch a new generation of missions.

It’s notoriously difficult to grow algae indoors. Light distribution is invariably uneven: as soon as the organism starts growing, it partially shades itself. Growth inhibits growth. The obvious solution is to use a thinner containment material, but then you risk it collapsing. It’s this balance – container weak enough to admit light, but strong enough to hold together – that eludes engineers. Experimentation is long and expensive. You can vary three things: species, container, environment, which means an almost infinite number of combinations. So the perfect solution is out there, we just might never find it.

‘Very generous of you. I’m trying to show how important the transition is, from prokaryote to eukaryote. A fluke event, interrupting what would have been endless repetition. So it makes sense, surely, that we should find out everything we can about it, about what exactly happened back then – right?’ ‘And you think the archaea from Endeavour can help?’ ‘Why not? So the theory is archaea and bacteria started to help each other.’ ‘Symbiosis.’ ‘Exactly. Which is actually much more prominent in evolution than most people admit. Which is interesting politically. Bacteria still sometimes live inside each other; they’re really strange. They borrow genes from each other all the time, wildly different species. There’s a theory that all bacteria constitute a single, massively distributed organism – a single individual, even . . . Anyway, so we think an archaeal cell and a bacterial cell formed a close chemical dependency, and – we can’t say how this happened; this is the miracle – the two cells fused, became a single, chimerical identity. An archaea cell with parts of a bacterial cell inside it. And this thing endured, because it was useful, it was helpful, it was easier to live this way. So the bacterial parts get repurposed inside the bigger cell, energy production changes, a ferocious, runaway complexity emerges, and eventually you have a nucleus.

‘What is symbiosis? It’s resilience through mutual effort.’ ‘So – what? You’re saying the gene from Endeavour might encourage symbiosis?’ ‘Possible, isn’t it? Maybe it’s the crucial gene in the emergence of complex life.’

‘Don’t be.’ I was sitting fully upright now. It felt intimate talking to Amy this way, darkness covering the distance. ‘I kind of love it. It’s so macabre. The reason we haven’t seen or heard from anything off-world is that reaching off-world status is a civilisational death knell. Life either gets stuck there or destroyed there. It still doesn’t really explain anything though – we can’t see anyone because it’s impossible to see anyone. It’s circular. It doesn’t say why becoming space proficient dooms us.’

‘This is Datura. It appeared a little over five years ago. It immediately shot to the front of Tier 1. We had never seen anything like it. As an asteroid, it was completely anomalous. And early indications suggested it was on a collision course with Earth.’ I went to speak but my mouth was dry. My lips hung open stupidly, as I failed to ask the question. ‘Fortunately, both our assumptions proved to be wrong. It isn’t on a course for Earth. And it isn’t an asteroid.’

Three telescope-mounted probes had been sent to get better visuals on the object. Uria tapped her screen again, and the enhanced images came up. 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.

‘OK. So when? What’s the timeframe?’ ‘As soon as possible. Realistically two, three years. From an engineering perspective, little has changed – the intention was always to prepare a long-range mission, the first of the Proscenium generation. We’d been working towards a mission to Datura, but now we need to go further. The new thrust design can get us there.’ ‘To where the transmission was sent from?’ ‘Yes. The near edge of the Oort cloud. That’s where we’re aiming for. And Leigh?’ ‘Yes?’ ‘I took you out here because of the work you’re doing. The further we go here, the more critical food is. You’re talking about a self-sustaining, high-nutrition, high-yield crop. You’ve convinced us. This could make or break the mission. You’re promising a stress-reliever, immunity booster, an emotional salve. We have to get this right. So I’m telling you you have full clearance, that from now on you’ll be privy to top-level meetings. You’re essential. We need you, Leigh, if we’re going to do this.’

Some of the visions were insane. One paper circulating in China Lake promised that with each new generation, ‘auto-ships’ would become more complex and self-sustaining, repairing and improving themselves mid-journey, growing and harvesting new parts. This wasn’t limited to uncrewed probes, but included large multi-passenger ships. More distantly and speculatively, 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.

Uria finally called a station meeting where she announced details of the Proscenium 1 mission. A press conference would follow soon afterwards. Nominally, the mission was an experiment that would trial the new thrust design, as well as innovations in ship layout and general systems. But it was much more than this. It was the beginning of a new era of exploration, the first of many Proscenium flights. The ship would travel approximately 1 million times further than any previous crewed vessel. The potential for gathering new information was incalculable. The primary aim was to intercept Voyager, contacting the entity responsible for the anomalies, but we were also interested in extracting samples from ice-rocks inside the near rim of the Oort cloud.

My plans to visit my sister and mother would have to wait. I had no choice; my priority was always the work, the crop, and if undergoing mission training would help this, then so be it. It never crossed my mind, as Uria and I went through the long contracts, that training would be anything other than a technical exercise.

I push off against a panel and drift to the far side of the cabin. The aircraft reaches the apex of its parabola and imperceptibly begins to turn, relative to the centre of the earth, reducing thrust and aiming towards a downward pitch. O’Neill says, ‘And now,’ and we lie back down, the substance of our bodies returns. A further minute’s pause, enduring silence, and this time I don’t need to be told. 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. I am coming back by degrees onto the cabin floor again, the nose of the plane pitching towards 30 degrees. Vomit first (delayed hyoscine) and then my tears, thick liquid running down my face. The total acceptance of my body, everything I am, by the atmosphere.

Eventually her records stopped; perhaps she’d listened, and been confused and upset by what she’d heard. I didn’t say anything, but continued sending my own unfiltered audio, the background hum of my own life, my own form of loneliness, the domestic space animated only by the feedback of a single consciousness.

Over the next two hours Mawson lays out the official version of events. Xichang has been attacked. This much we’ve already surmised. Not only has the local site been compromised, but Crew 1 are now ‘unable to participate’. He won’t tell us how bad it is, refuses even to confirm whether they’re alive. No one saw this coming. The Institute had full confidence in Beijing’s ability to stifle any attempted breach. The eco-groups protesting since the formation of the Institute now have military capability, and this changes everything. Contingency plans have been rolled out and the mission will launch from Baikonur; the necessary support staff are already on their way.

According to some definitions the power technically does not exist. If it cannot be satisfactorily observed and understood then it remains a theoretical property, invoked as a possible explanation for otherwise inexplicable phenomena, but not, in ordinary terms, real. Not felt, not seen, not incorporated into the imagination. This doubled nature – the reality and unreality of the power – has to be built into the craft. The source of the thrust design, the pattern on the object, the thing that will carry the ship. The whole of the propulsion system will be sealed from the crew. It isn’t just advisable, it’s essential. If you try to observe it, it disappears. The Institute reports ‘irreconcilable discrepancies’ during the trials. The power is still fundamentally unknown even to the flight surgeons who harness it. Observation could bring the whole thing down. The engineers are quiet on this. Tyler laughs, jokes about a cat. Have we destroyed Datura just by looking at it? Are our telescopes weapons?

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. The sky is clear blue. From the raised gantry I make out the horizon, the curve of the earth, the Îles du Salut under the flight path. It is time to go.

I liked this; it seemed to reveal a truth I already knew. The mystery of the ship applied equally to ourselves, and always had done. Our immersion in the past, our existence, wherever we might technically be, in times and places remote from the present. 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. Weaknesses define you, drive new and original strategies to cover them, and they make you who you are. You don’t exist without them. Correcting the errors – seeing perfectly and objectively – is neither desirable nor possible. So as I fed the second pouch in the garden, as I stepped cautiously over the floor in the mid-deck, as I gripped Helena’s dive watch and as I listened to archived audio clips of my mother’s voice, I was moving in a world largely of my own creation, a dream of the future built from an understanding of the past. Exactly like the two points along the display.

Our displays illustrate the expanse of the inner solar system. The heliosphere isn’t really a sphere at all, more an elongated teardrop shape. The whole inner system – the planets, the sun, the moons, the incalculable asteroids and micro debris – appears as a single curved body drifting through space. Like the juvenile stage of an aquatic life form. Was this all alive, on a completely non-appreciable scale? Was all this – 13 billion years – a brief beginning in a form that was yet to mature?

Everything turns on this moment. I’m convinced as he enters the room and looks towards me that he doesn’t know what he is doing. He has not decided on a course of action; he has arrived at my room for no purpose. He looks down at me, his eyes take in the scene. I’m sitting on the floor, my things spread on the carpet. When he opens his mouth he may do one of two things: breathe, or speak. It’s the second option that consumes me, the promise of revelation. The secret behind the universe. He looks round the room, surveys it, his first born, the clutter of her things spread haphazardly on the floor, and it’s too much for him – the memory of the first time he held me, how small I was in his arms, his own childhood and the terror induced by his father, my grandfather. As he looks at me, and the bewilderment in his eyes meets recognition in my own – this has happened before, an infinite number of times – the repetition is too much, and rather than speak, his open mouth inhales a quantity of oxygen. This feeds him. His colour changes. Invigorated, he leans his body fractionally, gaining further purchase before falling forward and bringing his right arm towards me in an arc. Still, at this point, I don’t realise what’s happening. Still, I think, he is coming forward to tell me something, to bring me a secret, to tell me what it all means, and even as my body is lifted off the ground, and my flight begins, there’s a delay. I don’t truly understand. I think it’s unreal, it’s part of...

They weren’t the first family to have a distant father with anger issues. A couple of times she’d sensed that Leigh was alluding to violence. This surprised her. She didn’t remember any of this; nothing out of the ordinary, anyway. So Geert occasionally slapped them lightly. This was just what fathers did back then. It certainly hadn’t been excessive, not as she remembers it. Leigh’s smile suggested she knew something Helena didn’t, and these are the only moments she can recall of her sister displaying a superior attitude towards her. As if her experiences privileged her to something Helena could never understand. She wishes she’d told her to just let go. Leigh insisted on letting her childhood define her. The proof of an alternative was right there in front of her – Helena – and Leigh always resented this.

A 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. I’m not sure we ever really knew each other, in the end.

Nothing endures, there is no organic continuity anywhere on the island.