See that? There goes Baja California. It’s always Baja California, isn’t it? I could watch the planet turn above me all day, which is why they limit you to ten minutes in here. It’s a major recreation, Earth-watching. They’ve got a fully-equipped Gaiaist contemplarium out in number two hydroponics tube. Hover in lotus, listen to whale song and watch the great green mother of us all spin before you. A Jodo Tendai chanting group time-shares it with a freefall yoga class. I promised myself before I left that I would not turn into one of these astronaut-mystics who find being beyond the envelope of atmosphere and gravity a religious revelation, but it would be very easy to succumb to a Zen state of disconnectedness with worldly things. Never could manage lotus, though. Something wrong with my left shin.
What you once told me about airline booking computers is doubly true for space shuttles. They put me next to a cetologist – God knows why they think they need a whale expert at the BDO; I suppose they want to cover every possibility – who was even more shit-scared than me but was damned if he was going to show it. He talked all the way through the pre-launch checks about how mutations were appearing in the whale populations that had responded to the Foa Mulaku call and that this was clear evidence that the cetaceans were at least as intelligent and worthy of species-vastening as humanity. When they actually lit the engines, he put his hands over his head and yelled all the way up to carrier body separation. His exact words to me were, ‘Well, that was more fun than Magic Mountain.’ I don’t think he meant the Thomas Mann novel.
The real story, according to Shepard. It was like being strapped into a windowless tube that suddenly accelerates and doesn’t stop and all those things they teach you about puffing your breath and not fully collapsing your lungs and pulling your belly muscles and tightening your sphincters all go straight out of your head because you cannot see where you are going, you have no idea where you are, you don’t have a clue what the hell is happening and you want it to be over like you’ve never wanted anything else to be over but at the same time you don’t because what happens next may well be worse. It seems like forever until carrier body separation, and that is like the bottom falling out of an express elevator leaving you clinging to the walls. The gees drop off a little, so it’s only a linebacker sitting on your chest and not a sumo wrestler, but that’s worse, because you feel underpowered, that you don’t have the speed to make it, that at any minute this blacked-out bus on wings is going to fall out of the sky.
And that’s exactly what it does. The words ‘throttle back’ do not appear in the HORUS pilot manuals. They give it full thrust until they’ve burned every drop of fuel in the tanks, and then they switch to glide. You go from multi-gees through HESO to freefall. Emphasis here is on the word ‘fall’. Everyone screamed. We all thought the engines had failed and we were plummeting to earth. Burn and crash. Quite a lot of barfing. Some had already shat themselves in fear when Clarkie launched. You’re sitting strapped into your seat trying to dodge globes of floating puke with the place smelling like a sewage pit and the pilot tells you that Arthur C. Clarke has achieved earth orbit and is moving into a transfer trajectory that will bring it to Space Station Unity in forty-nine minutes.
They say it’s worse going back down.
You’d think that at however many billion these things are apiece, it wouldn’t burn the budget to put in a few windows.
Got to go now. Next soul due for video-confession. I love you, Gaby. I miss you and Aaron like hell and it’s only nineteen hours. It’s a real temptation to touch the screen and ask you to touch it back and pathetic saccharine stuff like that. More tomorrow. See ya.
Space, Day Two.
Ernst Stavro Blofeld here.
The beautiful spiral of cloud above my left shoulder is Tropical Storm Hilary, spinning off across the Atlantic in the general direction of Ireland. It’s rapidly filling, so our weather watchers say; the far south-west should get a couple of inches of rain and a few tiles off the roof. You’re from the north-east, isn’t that right?
Space, I am discovering, is like camp. You don’t sleep enough, you don’t eat right, you don’t wash, you feel tired and puffy and constantly wondering where the hell you are. The cocoon bag they give you to sleep in is comfortable enough -weird, weird dreams, Gaby, I didn’t know I had them in me -and would be positively cosy for two, but two minutes after you tumble out, someone else tumbles in. We’re so overcrowded we’re running a hot-bagging system. Three shifts of eight hours in the sack. I hope the woman before me doesn’t have any nasty little habits for me to discover. Likewise, I hope I don’t leave any for the guy who comes after me.
It’s bad enough that everything looks stupid in freefall – eating, sleeping, talking, excreting, exercising with those dumb rubber bands, but in Unity it’s stupidity at close range. Intimacy is a necessity, privacy an inconvenient aberration. Going to the bath room; not only can you hear every grunt and groan and ah! but everyone has his or her own personal coloured nozzle for the cock-sucker, as we guys call it, and God help you if you use someone else’s. This is much worse than using another person’s toothbrush. There have been serious fights, I hear. Everything and everyone is in your face all the time. I’m surprised there are any faces left uneaten.
There’s a guy, he’s been here about a month longer than me, a Team Red boy; he has a Grateful Dead disc he just has to play at full volume at every possible occasion. Winning converts to the One True Music, he says. One True Music up his ass, if I get the chance. I’ll have to wait in line, there are fifty others want to throw him out the airlock, no questions asked, or, if they can’t get him, his disc will do. In space, no one can hear the Dead.
The Japanese team members cope with this best. I suppose all their lives are lived so close to others they want to bite faces off, but etiquette forbids.
Unity is strange, in that it’s a place with an inside but no outside. You don’t see anything as you go through the pressure link from the HORUS; it’s just a big tube after a tiny tube after a middling size tube. We could as easily be at the bottom of the sea, or the centre of the earth, as eight hundred miles up in space. It’s a hard place to envision whole – you get a much better idea from the television, where it looks mightily impressive, this mile-and-a-half tangle of construction beams, solar panels, tanks, environment modules. From the inside it’s the odd boom, or a bit of a solar array, or a manufacturing core glimpsed from a tiny window. It’s very easy to get lost in; the passages seem to move around and reconnect while you’re not looking. There is a grain of truth in this, every shift you wake up to find the engineers have bolted on a new section or opened a lock into a pressure body you never knew existed. Ironic, that it takes the advent of the BDO to push space exploration into a renaissance. This place, the HORUS shuttles, High Steel, the intra-orbit tugs; these would have been intolerable budget leeches fifteen years ago. We could go to Mars right now, if we didn’t have more interesting places to go. The BDO giveth us our reason to go into space, and it taketh away.
Someone’s coughing politely outside. One last impression, which was actually a first impression. On arriving at Unity, the first thing that hits you. It smells of fart. Three hundred people in a space designed to take one hundred and seventy-five at a pinch, an overstrained air-conditioning system and all that high-protein, high-carbohydrate food? Someone’s dropping one every second of the day – you are not going to believe this, but over in Hydroponics One they hold see-who-can-fart-themselves-the-furthest contests. Fart, feet and piss. They never tell you this on the television.