Orbital

“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. They were told this in training: keep a tally each day when you wake, tell yourself this is the morning of a new day. Be clear with yourself on this matter. This is the morning of a new day.”

One of the key features of orbital life is the distortion of time. A day isn’t measured according to hours but orbits. The psychological impact of this feature is implied in this passage featuring Roman, who tries to orient himself in time by tallying the number of days he’s spent on the station. This suggests the role that time and continuity play in maintaining one’s mental health.

“So what is the real subject of this painting—the king and queen (who are being painted and whose white reflected faces, though small, are in the centre background), their daughter (who is the star in the middle, so bright and blonde in the gloom), her ladies- (and dwarves and chaperones and dog) in-waiting, […] or is it us, the viewers, who occupy the same position as the king and queen[?] […] 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)?

Or—the teacher said—is it just a painting about nothing? Just a room with some people in it and a mirror?”

The riddle of Las Meninas becomes a recurring question for Shaun, who is thrust into the “labyrinth of mirrors that is human life” (158), as his wife refers to it in her postcard. The mystery of the painting’s subject mirrors the mystery of humanity’s self-obsession, as hinted at in the earlier passage from Chapter 1. Depending on how one interprets humanity’s significance in the universe, this explains why two of the possible answers to the riddle are “life itself” and “nothing.”

“Chie’s only mother now is that rolling, glowing ball that throws itself involuntarily around the sun once a year […] That ball is the only thing she can point to now that has given her life. There’s no life without it. Without that planet there’s no life.”

Chie’s personal dilemma revolves around her grief and how it affects her to have lost her mother while she is in space. In this passage, Chie echoes the previous chapter’s metaphor of Earth being a mother. In her case, there is a more literal meaning to the metaphor since the Earth is the only thing that remains of her origins now that both her parents have died. This causes her to regard it in a unique way compared to her colleagues on the station.

“For the first time ever you’ve been overtaken, say ground crews. You’re yesterday’s news, they joke, and Pietro jokes back that better yesterday’s news than tomorrow’s, if they know what he means. If you’re an astronaut you’d rather not ever be news.”

This passage begins hinting at The Cosmic Insignificance of Humanity as a theme by diminishing the importance of the station crew’s efforts. In the shadow of the new lunar mission, the orbital station is no longer novel, making it “yesterday’s news.” Pietro fires back with his characteristic dry humor. The dark undertones that accompany astronauts who make the news are an allusion to space exploration tragedies, such as the 1986 Challenger disaster.

“She went to put that thought into words for her brother but it felt like she was making an argument or trying to outdo or undermine what he’d told her […] 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.”

One of the key characteristics of life in orbit is the loneliness that it imposes on those who inhabit it. This is demonstrated through Nell’s personal conflict, which partly involves her inability to communicate the particulars of her life in space to anyone at home. Her reservation comes from the fear of being judged for her complex feelings about space, which include both wonder and terror. She does not want to make it seem like she has it worse than anyone back on Earth, but she doesn’t know how else they might understand unless they were in space as well.

“There is that idea of a floating family, but in some ways they’re not really a family at all—they’re both much more and much less than that. They’re everything to each other for this short stretch of time because they’re all there is […] They are each to the other a representative of the human race—they each have to suffice for billions of people […] This is the way it goes—and then another day they look into the face of one of those five people and there in their way of smiling or concentrating or eating is everything and everyone they’ve ever loved, all of it, just there, and 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.”

In lieu of their loved ones, the station crew must rely on each other for company, as demonstrated in this passage. The nature of their relationship is necessarily complex, as they are more than just work colleagues. They are also surrogates for every kind of special and mundane interaction they might have with anyone back on Earth. This puts them in the unique position to resolve Nell’s dilemma since they are the only ones she can really relate her fears and anxieties to, yet Nell continues to hold back with them because that is precisely what she does with her loved ones.

“They are like fortune tellers, the crew. Fortune tellers who can see and tell the future but do nothing to change or stop it. Soon their orbit will descend away to the east and south and no matter how they crane their necks backward at the earth-viewing windows the typhoon will roll out of sight and their vigil will end and darkness will hit them at speed.

They have no power—they have only their cameras and a privileged anxious view of its building magnificence. They watch it come.”

This passage utilizes irony to undermine the work that the crew members perform on the space station. With their perspective of the Earth, they are able to predict natural disasters like the approaching typhoon. However, this is the extent of their ability, leaving them helpless to stop the typhoon as it affects people like Pietro’s friend, the fisherman. The crew members are thus cursed with knowledge of the future, which they are powerless to affect.

“So they sometimes think it would be easier to unwind the heliocentric centuries and go back to the years of a divine and hulking earth around which all things orbited—the sun, the planets, the universe itself. 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.”

The apparent emptiness of the universe challenges the modernist assumption that humanity is not the center of the universe. As this passage explains, this puts human thinking in a bind, as it is reluctant to return to the perspective of geo-centrism. On the other hand, this magnifies the beauty and importance of the Earth as the only planet that has recognizably produced the miracle of civilization. The novel will continue to revisit this idea as a subtheme of the cosmic insignificance of humanity.

“So strenuously unrobotic is the astronaut’s heart that it leaves the earth’s atmosphere and it presses out—gravity stops pressing in and the counterweight of the heart starts pressing out, as if suddenly aware it is part of an animal, alive and feeling. An animal that does not just bear witness, but loves what it witnesses.”

Pietro argues against the replacement of human labor by underlining the human capacity to feel as the greatest advantage that humankind has over robots. Where robots are restricted to making quantitative judgments based on pre-programmed criteria, humans resist the natural laws of science by expressing its evaluation of the universe. This is key to drawing insight from experiments, as only humans can make sense of how a new discovery reflects and resolves the needs of humankind.

“And for the fisherman there’s this protective urge not to leave your things, they being the few things you still have after the last typhoon and the one before that and the one before that. There are maybe twelve hours before it hits, and you are on an island that’s off an island that’s in the ocean, hopelessly low-lying. So all you can do is lie low hopelessly. You survived all the others. You have a house made of tin, cardboard, hardboard and sticks, and these days the typhoons are so frequent and huge that there’s no point in building something better, it’s easier to have nothing much to lose than to keep losing something.”

In this passage, Harvey underscores The Human Cost of Climate Change as a theme. She points to the impact suffered by those directly affected by climate change, such as the Filipino fisherman. The fisherman is reluctant to evacuate his home because he has so little in his possession. To leave home behind is to lose all anyway, and he would rather stick around to protect what little he has than restart his life all over again. Evacuating would be unsustainable given his economic conditions.

“Every single other person currently in existence, to mankind’s knowledge, is contained in that image; only one is missing, he who made the image.

Anton has never really understood that claim, or at least the enchantment of it […] the more enchanting thing about Collins’s image is that, in the moment of taking the photograph, he is really the only human presence it contains.”

In this passage, Anton reflects on the historical photo that astronaut Michael Collins took of his colleagues and the Earth in 1969. His reflection mirrors Shaun’s contemplation on Las Meninas as he tries to locate the subject of the photo. Although the photo contains all of humanity in some sense, the framing of the photograph only really serves to underline Collins’s presence as the photographer. This speaks to the recurring effort to consider the Earth from a distance—when the astronauts look at the Earth from afar, they are not really reflecting on all of humanity but reflecting on themselves and their place in the universe.

“Do we want buildings on the moon? she said. I love the moon as it is, she said. Yes, yes, he’d answered, me too, 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.”

Pietro and his daughter once debated the merits of progress by considering its ramifications. While progress might lead to lunar colonization, Pietro’s daughter was unsure if she would want the moon to change due to human presence. This harkens to the larger theme of the human cost of climate change because it considers the possibility of humanity’s destructive impact on other environments and biospheres. This is why Pietro made the distinction that progress might be beautiful but not necessarily good.

“She took her mother to mean: look at those men landing on the moon, look at what’s possible given desire and belief and opportunity, and you have all of those if you want them, if they can do it you can do it, and by it I mean anything. […] I would have been among the youngest of the victims of the atomic bomb and circumstance could have killed me and you would never have been born. But you were born, and here we are, and here are these men on the moon, so you see, you are on the winning side, you are winning, and perhaps you can live a life that honours and furthers that? And Chie had said silently to her mother’s silent request: yes, I see.”

In this passage, as part of her attempt to process her grief, Chie tries to understand whether her mother supported her ambitions for space travel. An argument for support hinges on her mother’s survival of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, which emphasizes the miracle of her existence. Through the lens of this miracle, Chie is emboldened to prove that she is capable of the same things that the Apollo 11 mission achieved. This, in turn, honors the miracle of her mother’s survival and existence.

“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.”

In this passage, the crew members critique the absurd politics of space travel, which is represented by the issue of toilet use. Their time in space has enabled them to look past their national identities and accept one another as members of the same singular community. This is necessary for them to survive in the reaches of space, where they have no one else to rely on but each other.

“The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first […]

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.

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.”

This passage is key to developing the human cost of climate change as a theme. In orbit, the station crew realizes how the world is reshaped by the greed of billionaires and the nations that sent them to space. The crew members realize how their participation in the space program makes them complicit in this reshaping. This complicates their relationship not only to their mission but also to the ambitions that they have held for virtually of their lives.

“When they hear on the phonograph a recording of rapid firecracker drills and bursts, will they know that these sounds denote brainwaves? Will they ever infer that over forty thousand years before in a solar system unknown a woman was rigged to an EEG and her thoughts recorded? Could they know to work backwards from the abstract sounds and translate them once more into brainwaves, and could they know from these brainwaves the kinds of thoughts the woman was having? Could they see into a human’s mind? Could they know she was a young woman in love?”

In this passage, Harvey emphasizes the cosmic insignificance of humanity as a theme by closely examining the Voyager probes as an attempt to reach out to other sentient life in the universe. Harvey points out that although sentient life may exist, they might not have the means to appreciate humanity’s attempts to communicate with it. For as much as it contains a diversity of human sounds, critical facets of the human experience, such as love, are lost in the limited device of the Voyager Golden Record.

“One day their journeys to space will seem nothing but a coach excursion, and the horizons of possibility that open out at their fingers will only confirm their own smallness and briefness. They swim in microgravity like little watched fish. The heart cells they culture will one day be used to replace those of the slingshotting astronauts bound for Mars. But not their own, which are fated to die. They take blood, urine, faecal and saliva samples, monitor their heart rates and blood pressure and sleep patterns, document any ache, pain or unusual sensation. They are data. Above all else, that. A means and not an end.”

This passage stresses the cosmic insignificance of humanity by reminding the station crew of the role they play in the grand scope of the space program. They realize that their efforts are not important or historical in themselves but are important in the context of future efforts. This diminishes the challenging aspects of their experience in space, which includes Chie’s grief and the physical degradation of their bodies in microgravity.

“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. […] Now he doesn’t see a painter or princess or dwarf or monarch, 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. The only thing in the painting that could be called vaguely free.”

The recurring question of the subject of Las Meninas is finally resolved when Pietro interprets the dog as the subject of the painting, the best possible answer to Shaun’s question. The dog becomes clear to Shaun by way of its difference. As the only figure in the painting who doesn’t try to assert themself, the dog frees itself from the trap of vanity, which the station crew and the space program find themselves in. They reflect on their relationship with the Earth and find ways to transcend it, respectively.

“Except of course the universe doesn’t end at the stroke of midnight. Time moves on with its usual nihilism […] 

If the cosmic calendar is in fact all of time, most of which has not yet occurred, in another two months any number of things could have happened to the cool marble of earth and none of them promising from a life point of view […] Earth, if it survives, will be scorched and arid, its oceans boiled dry, a cinder stuck in an interminable orbit of a white dwarf black dwarf dying sun until the whole show ends as the orbit decays and the sun eats us up.”

This passage punctuates a metaphor wherein the entire lifespan of the universe is reduced to a year, with every event in its history adjusted proportionally. This underlines the cosmic insignificance of humanity as a theme by scaling human history against the larger history of the universe. What this passage emphasizes is that humanity, for all its achievements and undertakings, will only take up a fraction of the universe’s time. This diminishes the relevance of every human endeavor, including humanity’s first attempts at reaching space and the historic Apollo 11 mission.

“Those down there beneath the roof of cloud see a car door wing along a street followed by a sheet of corrugated iron. They see an uprooted tree smash into a bench itself smashed into a bike itself smashed up against a billboard that’s blown across the road. They see fifty children huddled behind a barricade of desks while the school around them blows away. They see rain spearing into the floodwaters that surge inland […] They see the ocean roll over a town. The airport collapse, the planes capsize. The bridges give.”

This passage demonstrates the human cost of climate change by presenting the physical impact of the typhoon as it makes landfall. The typhoon doesn’t just affect the fisherman; it impacts an entire town, drowning everything from cars to schools to planes in its wake. Describing them as beneath the “roof of cloud” alludes to how, to the station crew, the events of the typhoon are distant and abstract, something that they exist above. Meanwhile, those stuck beneath the clouds must reckon with the consequences of natural disasters worsened by climate change.

“Pietro doesn’t dream. He has a rare night of deep and solid unthinking sleep […] as if he knows that outside the earth falls away in perpetual invention and leaves nothing more for him to do. Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.”

Pietro’s resignation to the forces that dictate the space program is also a resignation to the complexity and grandness of life on Earth. His colleagues worry about their various personal dilemmas in their sleep. However, he understands that while he cannot assert himself against the powers that shape the world, he also understands that life is much greater than those same powers. This reassures him to submit himself with humility to the complexity of life.

“Did you know, says Capcom from ground control, that the record for the most lightning strikes sustained by one person has been broken? It was seven strikes, but as of last week a man in China has been struck by lightning eight times. Oh, says one of the lunar crew, does he carry a lightning rod around with him? The things people will do to break a record, laughs another, and Capcom tells them that eighty-four per cent of deaths by lightning strike are men. That figures, says one of the female crew. Live dumb, die young.”

The final chapter opens with this exchange between ground control and the crew of the new lunar mission, who have yet to experience the same insights that the space station crew has harbored during their time in space. In contrast to the station crew, the lunar crew looks at stories of human tragedy as trivial matters. They critique the story of the man being struck by lightning as one of stupidity without stopping to think about whether the man’s record was intentional or if he had been struck multiple times by accident. The recurring motif of the typhoon is meant to signal the latter as a strong possibility.

“A full-throttle scarper in their billionaire’s rocket, out and away, away from the junk, away from the breaking burning storming scintillating earth like fleeing the scene of a crime. Away from the plucking flinging brute typhoon and the houses barging down roads become rapids and calamitous ruin that can’t yet be measured. Away from the planet held hostage by humans, a gun to its vitals, teetering slightly on its canting orbit, away into virgin up-for-sale wilderness, this new black gold, this new domain ripe for the taking. Through their quarter-of-a-million-mile sward of space.”

This passage represents another extension of the human cost of climate change as a theme. It foreshadows the looming threat that human presence could pose on the moon, trailing the path between the two stellar bodies with the litter of past launches. Harvey frames the trip to the moon as an escape, allowing the lunar crew to flee from the destructive impact that the human race has enacted on Earth. The desire for progress is also often aligned with the desire for wealth and ownership, which is emphasized here through the metaphor comparing space to property and oil. This highlights elements of space exploration as greedy or escapist rather than merely scientific or hopeful.