Ian McDonald - Chaga

It was a good day for a launch, hot and clear. High pressure had come in on the tail of Hilary. Some pools of rainwater still stood on the grass beside the taxiway but the main strip had been dried during the night by special vehicles. Heat haze boiled off the concrete. The HORUS was a dark, predatory shadow, as improbably elongated as a hunting insect, moving within the shiver of the haze. It glided from the big hangar, along the taxiways to the end of the main runway and turned.

At ‘I minus sixty seconds on the big count-down display, the tractor unit disengaged and dashed like a photophobic beetle for its blast-proof bunker. The digits clicked down on the big counter. Everyone resisted the temptation to count along with the final five. This was not New Year. The clock reached zero.

A mile and a half down the runway, nothing happened in response to this.

Then Gaby screamed because it seemed to her as if the spaceship had exploded in a ball of smoke and flame. Then she saw a black shape hurtling out of the fire towards her. The tricks of the heat haze were dispelled. It was big. It was fast. It was riding on a tail of fire, coming right at her. Gaby’s heart leaped as the carrier body passed in front of the stand and, quite unexpectedly, quite improbably, quite magically, lifted into the air.

The noise was louder than anything she had ever heard in her life. She could scream her head off and no would know. She did. She watched, roaring in exuberance, the launcher go up, and keep going up, in a beautiful asymptotic curve, the HORUS orbiter clinging to its back like a thrilled child. The smoke blew away on the wind from the south, but the space ship kept climbing, over the artificial peninsula of the launch runway, over the tide water waders and the gulls and the big crabs, over the space-freaks and the rocket-fetishists down in Trailer Park, over the day-trippers in the jolly boats, over the green water of the Gulf Stream, still climbing. Nothing could bring it down now.

‘Ten miles out, fifty thousand feet,’ said the fat, bearded man with the ugly hat in the T-shirt with Fort Lauderdale in ‘10 on it.

‘Carrier body separation in mark twelve minutes,’ said the other fat bearded man, with the equally ugly hat and the T-shirt with the old-style shuttle on the front.

In the executive viewing stand the people who had seen all this before were leaving for their corporate hospitality suites, but Gaby McAslan’s face was still turned to the sky. She watched the brilliant speck of the rocket exhaust until it disappeared into the high blue.

‘Fucking hell!’ she shouted to Aaron. ‘Bloody fucking hell! Wasn’t that the greatest thing you ever saw?’

‘Are you crying?’ Aaron asked.

‘Of course I am,’ Gaby said. Then she saw Ellen Prochnow gather her entourage around her and head to the door of the presidential box. Fumbling in her handbag, Gaby ran along the row of seats, tried to get over the low partition wall.

‘Hey! Excuse me! Ms Prochnow! Could you spare me a wee minute of your time?’

Hi Gab.

I said I’d write.

I’m sorry my face is so puffy – you’re going to be seeing a lot of it; there isn’t much to look at in this little confession booth they call the Personal Communications Space – that’s freefall for you. Everyone ends up looking like a Bond villain. Three hundred Ernst Stavro Blofelds, hurtling round in their mad space station eight hundred miles above the Earth.

This is Space, Day One. If I shift the camera a little, there, can you see it? Mother Earth, up there above us. That’s the orientation I seem to have chosen. Most others orient themselves the other way up; feet down toward the Earth. I’m probably heading for vertigo and even more nausea than I’m feeling right now: everything you eat sits right on the bottom of your oesophagus and won’t shift. Also, everyone else is metric and this down-home hayseed is still in yards and miles. I’m trying to adjust, but I just can’t feel a kilometre.

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.