Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Author:Samantha Harvey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

Orbit 8, ascending

If you know where to look and you get a large zoom lens and close right in, you can see the man-made craters in the desert in Arizona that were dynamited out to resemble the moon. Here in the sixties Armstrong and Aldrin trained for their landing, though they’re going now, those craters, eroding away.

New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, borderless states and invisible cities on the wide dry cowhide of the southwest American belt. The clouds are wind-warped and ribbony and travelling. Here and there a momentary flash which signals the sun reflecting off the hull of an aeroplane; the plane can’t be seen, only the flash. And across this great leathery hide are nonsensical scorings, indentations pressed into a surface, which of course are rivers but which have no flow. They seem dry, static, accidental and abstract. They seem like strands of long fallen hair.

On the curve of the earth, fast approaching, is a mossier tinge, a land less arid; then a finger of blue with a depth of black. Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, Lake Erie. Their centres beaten steel in the afternoon sun.

The past comes, the future, the past, the future. It’s always now, it’s never now.

It’s 5 p.m. on their looping spacecraft. On the earth beneath them, where Toronto is just appearing, it’s still midday. On the other side of the world it’s already tomorrow and the other side of the world will arrive in forty minutes.

Over there, in tomorrow, the typhoon summons winds of a hundred and eighty miles per hour. It’s rampaging through the Mariana Islands. The sea levels off the islands’ coasts have already risen with the expansion of the warmer water, and now, where the winds push the sea toward the westward edges of its basin, the sea rises more and a five-metre storm surge engulfs the islands of Tinian and Saipan. It’s as though the islands are hit with cluster bombs – windows blown out, walls buckling, furniture flying, trees splicing.

Nobody foresaw the rapid growth of this typhoon, which in twenty-four hours has gone from a seventy-mile-an-hour skirmish in the middle ocean to a charging force closing in on land. The meteorologists who see the images of it now raise its level to a Category Five and some think typhoon and some think super-typhoon and there’s nothing to do but predict its landfall at the Philippines to the nearest hour. The hour, they say, will be 10 a.m. local time, 2 a.m. up here.

It’s all in the future on the earth’s other side, occurring on a day that hasn’t yet arrived. The crew go on with the last of their tasks. Anton eats an energy bar to fight off late afternoon drowsiness. Shaun removes the four fasteners on the bracket of the smoke detector that needs replacing. Chie inspects the bacteria filters. Their path now ups and overs and exits America where the Atlantic is ancient, the placid silver-grey of a dug-up brooch. Calm suffuses this hemisphere. And with no ceremony they complete another lap of the lonely planet.

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