We have all been travelling, the crew thinks, travelling for years with barely a moment of settling; all of us living out of bags and borrowed places, hotels, space centres and training facilities, sleeping on friends’ sofas in midway cities between one training course and another. Living in caves and submarines and deserts to test our mettle. 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.
In the lab they drift with a virtual-reality headset and an instructive voice asks warmly: count the number of seconds a blue square appears in your vision. They guess at eight seconds. Record this on the laptop. Thirty-six seconds. Twenty seconds. Three seconds. Twenty-nine seconds. Thank you, says the voice, and seems really to mean it. That was great, it says. Are you ready for the next task? Just hit Go when you are.
Now they must hold the blue square in their sight for different time durations which are given to them: five seconds, nineteen, four, thirty-eight. Then reaction times; how quickly do they touch a button on the laptop screen when the blue square appears. You did great, the voice says. Are you ready for the next task? Just hit Go when you are. For the first time this day America comes into sight portside in a polished mid-morning and soon rolls away.
Count to one minute and touch the screen when done.
Count to ninety seconds and touch the screen when done.
The minute, then the ninety seconds, seem to lose themselves midway, they’re counting too fast they think, then change their minds, no, too slow; they skip ahead from forty-two to forty-five, and instantly regret it, and linger at fifty. That was great, the voice says.
While they look at blue squares the equator is crossed and there’s a change of guard; the northern hemisphere comes and the moon has upturned. Its waxing light which was on its left hand limb is now on its right. A crêpe flipped in the pan. A thinning of stars. No longer the dense astral field of southern skies which look toward the Milky Way’s centre; now the stars they can see are those far-flung, on the Milky Way’s outer spirals where the galaxy fades in amassing light years and something gives way to less which gives way to nothing. Then night-time cedes to another day. Over Venezuela is that first blinding spike of light on the horizon that they know well to be the sun. It spikes and goes, spikes and goes. And then the right side of the earth’s curve becomes a gleaming scimitar. Silver pours out and the stars are banished and the dark ocean turns to an instant dawn.
You did great, the voice says. You were wrong every time! Too bad for you that when the blue square’s there for fifteen seconds you report ten; that your counted minute is an extendable thing – a minute and a half or sometimes more. Too bad for you, it consoles, that you’ve drifted too long, you’ve floated too long, that the clocks in your cells have gone off their pace. Too bad for you that when you wake up in the morning you don’t know where your arm is until you look, that without the feedback of weight your limbs are mislaid. (Where did I put it, that arm? says the panicked brain. Where did I leave it?) Too bad for you that your limbs are lost in space and that those lost in space are lost too in time. That you’re losing your grip. That when you snatch lightning-fast at a pair of pliers sailing by, your split second is a lumbering two or three, that time around you is growing idle and plump. That you are no longer the sharp tool you used to be. Too bad for you that the Omega Speedmaster watch on your wrist with its chronograph and tachymeter and coaxial escapement has no grasp of the fact that this is your seventh time around the earth since you woke up this morning, that the sun is up-down-up-down like a mechanical toy. Too bad for you that your world’s gone elastic and topsy-turvy and right-side-left and that now it’s spring and in half an hour it’s autumn and your body clock’s blitzed and your senses have slowed and your superfast astronaut uber-being self has gone a bit loose and carefree and swimmy like seaweed or jetsam. Are you ready for the next task? Just hit Go when you are.
The seconds dissolve and mean less and less. Time shrinks to a dot on a field of blank white, specific and senseless, then bloats without edges and loses its shape. They pounce on the cursor whenever they’re asked, quick as a flash, not quick at all. Europe moves below in an afternoon haze and the clouds mark out the shape of coastlines. There’s the south-west toe of England kicking limply at the North Atlantic, there’s the English Channel, blink and you’ve missed it, there’s Brussels and Amsterdam and Hamburg and Berlin, though they’re drawn in invisible ink on grey-green felt, there’s Denmark in its dolphin-leap towards Norway and Sweden, there’s the Baltic Sea and the Baltic States and suddenly Russia. Here came Europe, there went Europe. What a shame, says the voice still warmly, that you exist in all time zones and none at all, that you shift across longitudes in this great metal albatross, that more is asked of your brain than it knows how to do. Too bad for you that it all goes so quickly. That a continent lapses and gives way to another, that the earth, so beloved, never stays in your grasp. That the ride of your life will pass in an eyeblink, just as life does to the aging brain whose slowing makes everything appear to move faster. Too bad for you that before you know it you’ll be back in your landing capsule with its heat shield and parachute and you’ll crash through the atmosphere engulfed in fire and down you’ll go in a trail of plasma, and you’ll land God willing on a plain vaster than vision and be pulled from the capsule with pipe-cleaner legs and spluttering monosyllables where once was language.
At the brink of a continent the light is fading.
