The face beside him is a wet, hot presence at his left ear, and upside down – what quality of sound tells him the mouth is upside down he cannot say, but in the pitch dark he is certain that the face, just one inch from his ear, is now inverted. It jabbers something, Venison or Tennyson or some other name he does not recognise. Not on his shift, not on his deck, not in his department. A stranger, even here, thinks Jim, and wants to cry. A dark unknown, suspended in a greater dark.
Hands pat and palpate him, fumbling for purchase, and he feels her breath on his cheek, its hot, wet pulse as intimate and shocking as a tongue, and then it is gone as his hands and her hands find each other in the dark and her hand finds his bruised hand and he gasps with pain and pulls his hand away and the corridor rips along its length as sure and straight as if along a seam and flattens itself, showing them themselves against the stars, as in a vast and cinematic mirror. He loses purchase. She reaches for him, reaches up for him, to hold him fast, but she cannot reach him as he wheels above her, a new star, spreadeagled, Union Jack patch bright and primary against the welling Earthlight. The woman – Tenterden? Verizon? What’s in a name? – turns to face that massive and appalling planet whose light and mass and heat they have so recently escaped. Jim, floating above her, waves desperately, while she clings to a stanchion in the unwound tunnel, her flesh gently swelling as though she were blooming in the light of Earth, and her outgoing breath is a puff of ice crystals that Jim, in his own anoxic, depressurised and surely dying state takes to be seeds or spores spilling from her puffball mouth. He fancies that she is shouting his name. But he knows he is only bootstrapping cold comfort for himself in these, his last seconds, and as the Earth rises over the metal ribbon in which they were wrapped, it comes to him that death is taking its own sweet time, and seems indeed to have forgotten him.
For the longest time he hangs there, spreadeagled British star, contemplating, as he pulls away, the wreck of all personal and national hopes, and why can he not die?
Jim sees with a sinking heart that the ship has buckled, failing at the place, the joint, that even a child would have pointed to and said, The weak spot’s here. The giant shock absorbers have shivered and flung their sockets, sending engine and crew tumbling into different, equally unstable orbits.
This undying man, this British astronaut called James Lanyon, does not understand his life, or why it should continue now that the face he clung to is gone. The face, the hair, her hands on him, her breath upon his cheek. This man turned dying star looks for the woman whose name he cannot figure and sees the corridor in which they were caught, spread wide and flattened like the tube from a roll of toilet paper. He sees her, tethered to a pipe by a yellow harness. She had been safe, he sees. She had been trying to save him. She had not careened into him. He had careened into her. She was the still point in that space: his anchor. And here she is, her breath a thousand spores scattering in barren space, her flesh blue and swollen, oedema puppying her, making a doll of her, a thing of fabric more than flesh, and he remembers her breath on his cheek. He feels tears, and how is it that his tears float liquid in his eyes, turning the wreckage before him into so many threads of light? How can his tears be wet, when her eyeballs are ice?
And thinking this, he lets his gaze drift away, which has been focused on the painfully fine grain of the stranger’s body. His field of attention widens, threads clearing as he blinks, to take in more, and yet more, as he is led away (by whom? by what?), his field of view expanding with distance as he travels, faster and yet faster, from the scene of the disaster. He sees it whole now: the frigate-sized living quarters on whose behalf the Victory’s great elastic heart once, and so very briefly, beat out a nuclear pulse. Where is that valiant engine now, its pneumatic legs spread and pulsing, appendages of an atomic space-jellyfish?
The ship’s drive was a spinning disc of concrete, and through its centre, once every four seconds, nuclear devices were fed by a machine that, but for its size, would be familiar to any vending-machine engineer. When the ship buckled the living quarters, fighting free, limped off crippled, bent askew and barely space-worthy: certainly no match for the rigours of reentry. In the tense hour following the accident, the crew held a silent vigil, all ears to the Tannoys on every deck and stair. Now all was being stored away again, as the doomed spacefarers set about softly tidying their tomb. With motive power gone, all was afloat. In silence, the crew moved listlessly, securing all the things they had already unstrapped, so cocksure, once the atomic engines had begun to pulse and the floors had begun, in jerks at first, and then with greater smoothness, to deliver the promised one-gravity.
With the drive gone, they knew they were doomed. Impossible to convince a crew so highly trained that a stable orbit was achievable now. Having flung itself from its broken but still-pumping drive, the accommodation module stood no chance of survival. They had only to look out of the frigate’s many generously proportioned portholes, where the view was impossible to parse: a whirligig of stars and clouds as the ship tumbled around the Earth in an ever-tightening spiral.
The accommodation module had thrusters meant to orientate it finely for docking with and undocking from its engine. Half these thrusters had been destroyed in the brutal act of separation, but the ones ranged forward remained and still held a little fuel. By line of sight, by trial and by error, the helmsman brought the ship about and steady on its axis. The awful Earth turned beneath and about them. The stars, doused by Earthlight, went out one by one. The crew waited for nightside, and a chance to hide in their minds from the planetary mass that would in a very little while embrace and consume them. But nightside did not come, and the Earth swung about them like a big, bright, smothering parent as if illuminated by its own light.
Of the sun, by some eccentricity of their turn and trajectory, there was no sign.
What further disaster has befallen the frigate, James cannot begin to guess, embroiled as he is in the event of it. He can only witness: a somehow undying eye.
Shocked out of the capacity for further shock, Jim watches with a feeling at once profound and nameless – a great annihilating wave of sensation – as the ship unfolds itself, an aluminium origami reversing itself into sheets of base metal. The flattened and unwoven plates of the ship turn on a mutual axis, plates striking plates without a sound, so that all are sent spinning on syncopated rhythms, turning to the light and knifing into the dark. A complex visual score, lacking all edge of violence, unfolds before his somehow still-working eyes. James grows drowsy. He closes his eyes.
And opens them, shaking, breath heaving, as the enormity of his state comes upon him. Where is everyone? How is it that he is pulling away from all this? What explains his steady withdrawal?
Refocusing, hunting for clues, he witnesses further mysteries. The wreck has begun to foam. White froth emerges from every intact hole in the dismantled craft. Once the foam has dribbled off, each hole yawns, a distorted, screaming mouth, folds open, turns inside out and unwinds into a kind of flower: its petals are metal surfaces, and a bouquet of tangled wires and mangled ducts serves for sexual parts. All these materials are sorted as he watches, bundled and batched; the flowers are picked and pulled apart – she loves me, she loves me not – and it comes to him that the Victory is being dismantled and sorted by agents which, at this distance, are too small for him to see.