"Orbital"

[fiefoe]

I felt like Samantha Harvey really took me to space to be with all six astronauts in the space station, so who cares it's definitely not SF and it doesn't have a plot?

• As the typhoon moves west towards southern Asia, their craft tracks east, eastward and down towards Patagonia where the lurch of a far-off aurora domes the horizon in neon. The Milky Way is a smoking trail of gunpowder shot through a satin sky... Over its right shoulder the planet whispers morning – a slender molten breach of light. They slip through time zones in silence.
• Some alien civilisation might look on and ask: what are they doing here? Why do they go nowhere but round and round? The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing.
• * To his tally kept on a piece of paper in his crew quarters, Roman will add the eighty-eighth line. Not to wish the time away but to try to tether it to something countable. Otherwise – otherwise the centre drifts. Space shreds time to pieces... But it’s a day of five continents and of autumn and spring, glaciers and deserts, wildernesses and warzones. In their rotations around the earth in accumulations of light and dark in the baffling arithmetic of thrust and attitude and speed and sensors, the whip-crack of morning arrives every ninety minutes. They like these days when the brief bloom of daybreak outside coincides with their own.
• * There was a lesson at school about the painting Las Meninas, when Shaun was fifteen. It was about how the painting disoriented its viewer and left them not knowing what it was they were looking at...  Or, is the subject art itself (which is a set of illusions and tricks and artifices within life), or life itself (which is a set of illusions and tricks and artifices within a consciousness that is trying to understand life through perceptions and dreams and art)?
• They all make an association between the earth and a mother, and this in turn makes them feel like children. In their clean-shaven androgynous bobbing, their regulation shorts and spoonable food, the juice drunk through straws, the birthday bunting, the early nights, the enforced innocence of dutiful days, they all have moments up here of a sudden obliteration of their astronaut selves and a powerful sense of childhood and smallness.
• Think a new thought, they sometimes tell themselves. The thoughts you have in orbit are so grandiose and old. Think a new one, a completely fresh unthought one. <> But there are no new thoughts. They’re just old thoughts born into new moments – and in these moments is the thought: without that earth we are all finished. We couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea. <> None of them knows what to say to Chie, what consolation you can offer to someone who suffers the shock of bereavement while in orbit.
• No need to speak; you only have to look out through the window at a radiance doubling and redoubling. The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife.
• Everything that speaks of being in space – which is everything – ambushes them with happiness, and it isn’t so much that they don’t want to go home but that home is an idea that has imploded – grown so big, so distended and full, that it’s caved in on itself.
• the narrow line of the Kuril Islands that tread a worn-out path between Japan and Russia. In this indistinct light the islands seem to Chie to be a trail of drying footprints. Her country is a ghost haunting the water. Her country is a dream she remembers once having. It lies slantwise and slight.
• You have to keep moving. You have this glorious orbit and when you’re orbiting you’re impact-proof and nothing can touch you. When the planet is galloping through space and you gallop after it through light and dark with your time-drunk brain, nothing can end. There could be no end, there can be only circles.
• 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.
• They will: change the smoke detectors, change out the Water Resupply Tank in slot 2 and install a new tank in slot 3 of the Water Storage System, clean the bathroom and kitchen, fix the toilet-that-always-breaks. Their day is mapped by acronyms, MOP, MPC, PGP, RR, MRI, CEO, OESI, WRT for WSS, T-T-A-B. <> Today there is one item on the Of Extra-Special Interest list above all others, the typhoon moving over the Western Pacific towards Indonesia and the Philippines,
• * She finds she often struggles for things to tell people at home, because the small things are too mundane and the rest is too astounding and there seems to be nothing in between, none of the usual gossip, the he-said-she-said, the ups and downs; there is a lot of round and round. There’s a lot of contemplation of how it’s possible to get nowhere very fast.
• They are each to the other a representative of the human race – they each have to suffice for billions of people. They have to make do in lieu of every earthly thing – families, animals, weather, sex, water, trees. Walking. Some days they just want to walk, or lie down. When they miss people and things, when earth feels so far away that depression washes over them for days and even the view of the sun setting over the Arctic isn’t enough to lift them, then they have to be able to see the face of one of the others on board and find something there that keeps them going. Some solace. They don’t always... humanity, in coming down in its essence to this handful of people, is no longer a species of confounding difference and distance but a near and graspable thing.
• * You’d need far more distance from the earth than they have to find it insignificant and small; to really understand its cosmic place. Yet it’s clearly not that kingly earth of old, a God-given clod too stout and stately to be able to move about the ballroom of space; no. Its beauty echoes – its beauty is its echoing, its ringing singing lightness. It’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre; it’s not everything and it’s not nothing, but it seems much more than something. It’s made of rock but appears from here as gleam and ether, a nimble planet that moves three ways... there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.
• Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of 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. <> Until then what can we do in our abandoned solitude but gaze at ourselves? Examine ourselves in endless bouts of fascinated distraction, fall in love and in hate with ourselves, make a theatre, myth and cult of ourselves. Because what else is there?
• these strange obsessed human creatures will be back on its powdered surface, these beings who insist on flying flags in a windless world, these single-minded marshmallow folk, bloated sailors of the sky,
• * What are you anyway as an astronaut but a conduit – you are selected for your non-stick temperament, maybe one day a robot could do your job and maybe it will; you have to wonder.
• Early October now, and still, he’s told, no rain. And yet regardless the planet sings with light as if from its core, from the belly of itself, this great photogenic thing which he collects in his lens.
• Even the photo he took of you all has a spell of wonder – your wife slender-faced and rueful, you, yourself, intense and lion-like, the four children (sitting, standing, surprised, suspicious, serene, grinning, clinging) a collective of tumbled beauty – it made you notice as if for the first time quite how beautiful your children are.
• The light gains edges and limbs; folds and opens. Strains against the inside of the atmosphere, writhes and flexes. Sends up plumes. Fluoresces and brightens. Detonates then in towers of light. Erupts clean through the atmosphere and puts up towers two hundred miles high. At the top of the towers is a swathe of magenta that obscures the stars, and across the globe a shimmering hum of rolling light, of flickering, quavering, flooding light, and the depth of space is mapped in light.
• But the day I watched a video of the first moon landing with my father and uncle, well, it was my father’s face. He seemed to be full of this wanting, him and my uncle, like it made their own lives feel both empty and full at once. I didn’t like it. It put me off. To think of my dad’s face all hungry and lacking. <> Nell thinks she knows it, that look, a look men get watching sports, football, say, in support of a team that affirms them by winning and then straight away negates them, because the glory belongs to the team, not the man sitting on the sofa who will never, now, be on a team like that.
• The bone she’d most like to have found is the one that runs down the inside of the forearm, the ulna or radius, that long expressive bone she’d always see inside her mother’s wrist while her mother was washing or brushing Chie’s hair, the way its mechanism flexed and moved like a pulley.
• * but all those things are beautiful, because their beauty doesn’t come from their goodness, you didn’t ask if progress is good, and a person is not beautiful because they’re good, they’re beautiful because they’re alive, like a child. Alive and curious and restless. Never mind good. They’re beautiful because there’s a light in their eyes. Sometimes destructive, sometimes hurtful, sometimes selfish, but beautiful because alive. And progress is like that, by its nature alive.
• A hubris so almighty it’s matched only by his stupidity. And these phallic ships thrust into space are surely the most hubristic of them all, the totems of a species gone mad with self-love. <> But what he meant to say to his daughter – and what he will say when he returns – is that progress is not a thing but a feeling, it’s a feeling of adventure and expansion that starts in the belly and works up to the chest (and so often ends in the head where it tends to go wrong). It’s a feeling he has almost perpetually when here, in both the biggest and smallest of moments – this belly-chest knowing of the deep beauty of things, and of some improbable grace that has shot him up here in the thick of the stars.
• * None of those is quite the word. It’s not so much that the earth is one thing and the weather another, but that they’re the same. The earth is its air currents, the air currents the earth, just as a face is not separate from the expressions it makes.
• they move like – like they’re not moving, the water is undisturbed by them. I didn’t see that but I saw a whale shark,.. Just the light, Pietro says, streaming through the water. Just the depth of the colour blue, Nell agrees. Just the light, the colour, the creatures, the coral, the sounds, just everything. Pietro agrees: just everything.
• all of Chie’s courage she owes to her mother. Her resilience and thickness of skin and preparedness for anything, even the difficult or painful or dangerous. Her daring and delight at the difficult and dangerous. Her test-pilot brain that makes her think flying and breathe flying and dream flying. The sporting rivalry she has with death, which she’s winning and which makes her feel herself invincible, unbruisable.  <nuclear bomb survivor descendent>
• If we have any single thing in common it’s our acceptance of belonging nowhere and everywhere in order to reach this, this near-mythical craft. This last nationless, borderless outpost that strains against the tethers of biological life. What does a toilet have to do with anything? What use are diplomatic games on a spacecraft, locked into its orbit of tender indifference? <> 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.
• Somehow, Nell thinks, once you’ve been on a spacewalk, looking at space through a window is never the same. It’s like looking through bars at an animal you once ran with. An animal that could have devoured you yet chose instead to let you into the flank-quivering pulse of its exotic wildness.
• while you grapple with the pistol-grip tool and the torque multiplier and the old bolts that have got stuck and which you have no force of gravity to remove, and two hundred and fifty miles beneath your feet the buffed orb of earth hangs too like an hallucination, something made by and of light, something you could pass through the centre of, and the only word that seems to apply to it is unearthly.
• Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire – no, the need (fuelled by fervour) – to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ran-sacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?
• * Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices. Every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier, every granite shoulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted,... the expanding green-blue geometries of evaporation ponds where lithium is mined from the brine, or Tunisian salt flats in cloisonné pink, or the altered contour of a coastline where sea is reclaimed metre by painstaking metre and turned into land to house more and more people... or the hundreds of acres of greenhouses which make the entire southern tip of Spain reflective in the sun. <> The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first.  It’s utterly manifest in every detail of the view, just as the sculpting force of gravity has made a sphere of the planet and pushed and pulled the tides which shape the coasts, so has politics sculpted and shaped and left evidence of itself everywhere. <> They come to see the politics of want. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more, that’s what they begin to see when they look down. They don’t even need to look down since they, too, are part of those extrapolations, they more than anyone –on their rocket whose boosters at lift-off burn the fuel of a million cars.
• With the atrophying of the body life doesn’t tug at him so much. He feels hungry so he eats, and the sinuses are so blocked that the food has no taste; ... Everything in his body seems to lack commitment to the cause of its animal life, as if there’s a cooling of systems, an efficient running-down of superfluous parts. In the slowing and cooling he hears his thoughts more, they’re distant bells chiming one at a time in his head.
• And the way they move around the labyrinth of the spaceship as if around a wreck – the constricted spaces, the hatches that open into narrow tubes that warren this way and that in near-identical patterns, until it’s hard to know where you started from or where the earth will be when you look out. And when you do look out any claustrophobia becomes agoraphobia in an instant, or you have both at once.
• The rich purplish-green of the vast Nile Delta. Brown becomes peach becomes plum; Africa beneath them in its abstract batik. The Nile is a spillage of royal-blue ink. <> Her husband says that Africa from space looks like a late Turner; those near-formless landscapes of thick impasto shot with light.
• And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless. Those people can swap out a house for a spaceship, a field for a universe.
• the knowledge of having found that thing in the world which she ought never to have had the good fortune of finding, of two minds and bodies flung at each other at full dumbfounding force so that her life had skittered sidelong and all her pin-boned plans just gone like that and her self engulfed in a fire of longing and thoughts of sex and destiny, the completeness of love, their astounding earth, his hands, his throat, his bare back.
• At the beach hut they’d been human, a woman, a man, a wife and mother and daughter and a husband and father and son, and they’d crossed themselves, tapped their nails and bitten their lips in unconscious angst. But when they’d got to the launch pad they were Hollywood and sci-fi, Space Odyssey and Disney, imagineered, branded and ready. The rocket peaked in a cap of gleaming newness, absolute and spectacular whiteness and newness, and the sky was a glorious and conquerable blue.
• Blue becomes mauve becomes indigo becomes black, and night-time downs southern Africa in one. Gone is the paint-splattered, ink-leached, crumpled-satin, crumbled-pastel overflowing-fruit-bowl continent of chaotic perfection, the continent of salt pans and red sedimented floodplain and the nerve networks of splaying rivers and mountains that bubble up from the plains green and velvety like mould growth. Gone is a continent and here another sheer widow’s veil of star-struck night.
• The lovelessness of his marriage is a fact that has come upon him gradually, one gentle dawning after the other. When he’s seen through a telescopic lens the flowlines made by ships pulling at the ocean, or the ancient shorelines of Bolivia’s bright orange Laguna Colorada, or the red sulphur-stained tip of an erupting volcano, or the wind-cut folds of rock in the Kavir Desert, each sight has come to him as a winching open of the heart, a crack at a time.
• * What of the Filipino children he and his wife met on their honeymoon, the fisherman’s children? ... like they knew and saw what their parents didn’t (or what their parents had chosen to overlook). That is, that the tables would never turn; that whatever universe Lightyear here and his tall nice-smelling and subtly pregnant wife had come from, they’d never see it, they’d never be sitting for dinner in the invaders’ home on a luxury holiday with that one-day child, unless by some charitable favour they could never repay. And all the same and for all their distrust, the same measure of utter acceptance, of brimming giving, the gifts of shells they’d found,
• Your problem, in America, Roman says, is you don’t put enough condensed milk in things. Actually that’s the problem with the whole of the rest of the world.
• * You know, it billows; just slightly it billows like a ship’s sail in a perfect wind. And you know, then, that so long as you stay in orbit you will be OK, you will not feel crestfallen, not once. You might miss home, you might be exhausted, you might feel like you’re an animal in a cage, you might get lonely, but you will never, never be crestfallen. <> It’s like the spirit goes in you, then, not out of you. Like everything is alive? Like your sleeping bag is alive.
• * when the time comes to go in several months, he won’t wish to. An intoxication; the height-sick homesick drug of space. The simultaneous not wanting to be here and always wanting to be here, the heart scraped hollow with craving, which is not emptiness in the least, more the knowledge of how fillable he is. The sights from orbit do this; they make a billowing kite of you, given shape and loftiness by all that you aren’t.
• you think only of your next breath, which must be shallow so as not to use too much oxygen, but not too shallow, and even the breath after that is of no concern, only this one. When you see the moon, or the pinkish tinge of Mars, you don’t think about the future of humanity but only, if anything, the logistical likelihood of you or anyone you know being lucky enough to go there. You think of your own selfish obsessive brazen humanity, yourself elbow barging past thousands of others to get to the launch pad, because what else gave you an edge over those but the propulsion of a self-determination and belief that burns up everything else in its path?
• * Who is looking at whom? The painter at the king and queen; the king and queen at themselves in a mirror; the viewer at the king and queen in the mirror; the viewer at the painter; the painter at the viewer, the viewer at the princess, the viewer at the ladies-in-waiting? Welcome to the labyrinth of mirrors that is human life... In a painting that’s all about looking and seeing, it’s the only living thing in the scene that isn’t looking anywhere, at anyone or anything. He sees now how large and handsome it is, and how prominent... he sees a portrait of a dog. An animal surrounded by the strangeness of humans, all their odd cuffs and ruffles and silks and posturing, the mirrors and angles and viewpoints; all the ways they’ve tried not to be animals and how comical this is, when he looks at it now. And how the dog is the only thing in the painting that isn’t slightly laughable or trapped within a matrix of vanities.
• That’s all this great human endeavour of space exploration really is, he thinks, an animal migration, a bid for survival. A looping song sent into the open, a territorial animal song. <> With his eyes closed he can hear that gibbon call, hollow and echoing. Can see the dog in the painting in its private dignity.
• They were weightless not through lack of gravity – there’s plenty of gravity here, so close to earth – but because they were in a constant state of free fall... they could see what had only been theoretical before, that the earth was curving away from the hurtling free-falling craft at the exact rate the craft was travelling.. They inside making somersaults backwards and forwards, because sometimes that’s the only thing to do when you’re falling and falling around the earth.
• Christmas Day, though Christ’s not yet born – 0.23 billion years ago, and here come the dinosaurs for their five days of glory before the extinction event that wiped them out, or wiped out at least those landlubbing ones, the plodders and runners and tree-munchers, and left in their absence a vacant spot: Wanted – land-dwelling life forms, no time-wasters, apply within, and who should apply but the mammalian things,
• the observers of atoms, the adorners of bodies, the gobblers of pills, the splitters of hairs, the scratchers of heads, the owners of minds, the losers of minds, the predators of everything, the arguers with death, the lovers of excess, the excess of love, the addled with love, the deficit of love, the lacking for love, the longing for love, the love of longing, the two-legged thing, the human being.
• * the Gobi Desert in seeming plainness, except in looking closer there are the fearless brushstrokes of a painter who sees in sand the movement of water and sees in brown bolts of duck-egg mauve lemon and crimson, and casts the arid in shades of oil spill, and makes of canyons nacreous shells.
• Though their orbit proceeds in a straight line around the planet, the planet’s turn makes the orbital path appear to loop up and down, north and south in deep undulations, from the rim of the Arctic Circle to the southern seas. 
• * The coast of Canada portside not a coast at all but a land that’s been sledgehammered into random pieces. <> Before they came here there used to be a sense of the other side of the world, a far-away-and-out-of-reach. Now they see how the continents run into each other like overgrown gardens... Europe runs into Asia with not a note of fanfare. Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels – not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses. It holds no possibility of opposition... When land comes again you think, oh yes, as if you’ve just woken up from a captivating dream. And when ocean comes again you think, oh yes, as if you’ve woken up from a dream in a dream, until you’re so dream-packed that you can find no way out and don’t think to try.
• Night has unravelled the earth’s blue-green weave. The equator is crossed again from north to south and the moon is dusky and one degree fatter. Suddenly now, as if displeased, the Terminator swipes daylight off the face of the earth and the stars burst up like snowdrops from God knows where. In their sleep the crew feel the abrupt weight of night – someone has turned off that great bulb of a planet.
• * Maputo here, Harare there, Lusaka over there, Mombasa ahead, and each is a small heap of gold coins on a tapestried cloth, joined by nothing – no night-lit roads or urban sprawl. A beautiful velvety poverty of man on an earth that tips into the void;
• * With each sunrise nothing is diminished or lost and every single one staggers them. Every single time that blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it, a momentary immaculate star, then spills its light like a pail upended, and floods the earth, every time night becomes day in a matter of a minute, every time the earth dips through space like a creature diving and finds another day, day after day after day from the depth of space, a day every ninety minutes, every day brand new and of infinite supply, it staggers them.
• The crack that’s appeared outside gives a millimetre or two. It sends out fissures that broadly echo an aerial map of the confluencing Volga River. It’s not so far from Roman’s head, this crack, on the other side of the thin alloy shell, and no patching with epoxy and Kapton tape is going to hold it. The pressure in the Russian module drops just a fraction, barely noticeable, not enough to sound any alarm,
• You think it’ll burst into song, the way the choral sound emerges full of intent, and this polished-bead planet sounds briefly so sweet. Its light is a choir. Its light is an ensemble of a trillion things which rally and unify for a few short moments before falling back into the rin-tin-tin and jumbled tumbling of static galactic woodwind rainforest trance of a wild and lilting world.