Ian McDonald - Chaga

Space, Day Two.

Ernst Stavro Blofeld here.

The beautiful spiral of cloud above my left shoulder is Tropical Storm Hilary, spinning off across the Atlantic in the general direction of Ireland. It’s rapidly filling, so our weather watchers say; the far south-west should get a couple of inches of rain and a few tiles off the roof. You’re from the north-east, isn’t that right?

Space, I am discovering, is like camp. You don’t sleep enough, you don’t eat right, you don’t wash, you feel tired and puffy and constantly wondering where the hell you are. The cocoon bag they give you to sleep in is comfortable enough -weird, weird dreams, Gaby, I didn’t know I had them in me -and would be positively cosy for two, but two minutes after you tumble out, someone else tumbles in. We’re so overcrowded we’re running a hot-bagging system. Three shifts of eight hours in the sack. I hope the woman before me doesn’t have any nasty little habits for me to discover. Likewise, I hope I don’t leave any for the guy who comes after me.

It’s bad enough that everything looks stupid in freefall – eating, sleeping, talking, excreting, exercising with those dumb rubber bands, but in Unity it’s stupidity at close range. Intimacy is a necessity, privacy an inconvenient aberration. Going to the bath room; not only can you hear every grunt and groan and ah! but everyone has his or her own personal coloured nozzle for the cock-sucker, as we guys call it, and God help you if you use someone else’s. This is much worse than using another person’s toothbrush. There have been serious fights, I hear. Everything and everyone is in your face all the time. I’m surprised there are any faces left uneaten.

There’s a guy, he’s been here about a month longer than me, a Team Red boy; he has a Grateful Dead disc he just has to play at full volume at every possible occasion. Winning converts to the One True Music, he says. One True Music up his ass, if I get the chance. I’ll have to wait in line, there are fifty others want to throw him out the airlock, no questions asked, or, if they can’t get him, his disc will do. In space, no one can hear the Dead.

The Japanese team members cope with this best. I suppose all their lives are lived so close to others they want to bite faces off, but etiquette forbids.

Unity is strange, in that it’s a place with an inside but no outside. You don’t see anything as you go through the pressure link from the HORUS; it’s just a big tube after a tiny tube after a middling size tube. We could as easily be at the bottom of the sea, or the centre of the earth, as eight hundred miles up in space. It’s a hard place to envision whole – you get a much better idea from the television, where it looks mightily impressive, this mile-and-a-half tangle of construction beams, solar panels, tanks, environment modules. From the inside it’s the odd boom, or a bit of a solar array, or a manufacturing core glimpsed from a tiny window. It’s very easy to get lost in; the passages seem to move around and reconnect while you’re not looking. There is a grain of truth in this, every shift you wake up to find the engineers have bolted on a new section or opened a lock into a pressure body you never knew existed. Ironic, that it takes the advent of the BDO to push space exploration into a renaissance. This place, the HORUS shuttles, High Steel, the intra-orbit tugs; these would have been intolerable budget leeches fifteen years ago. We could go to Mars right now, if we didn’t have more interesting places to go. The BDO giveth us our reason to go into space, and it taketh away.

Someone’s coughing politely outside. One last impression, which was actually a first impression. On arriving at Unity, the first thing that hits you. It smells of fart. Three hundred people in a space designed to take one hundred and seventy-five at a pinch, an overstrained air-conditioning system and all that high-protein, high-carbohydrate food? Someone’s dropping one every second of the day – you are not going to believe this, but over in Hydroponics One they hold see-who-can-fart-themselves-the-furthest contests. Fart, feet and piss. They never tell you this on the television.

More tomorrow. Love you.

It’s me again, Gaby. It’s Unity. Day Three.

I’m just back from a BDO-watching party down in Remote Sensing. Direct feed from Hubble and our own, smaller, observatory. The orbital telescopes can achieve such fine detail you can see Gaia’s shadow passing over the bright end, like a flea on Mount Rushmore. It brings home what a big mother that thing out there really is. We can see the mountains on the outer skin, watch the shadows lengthen and shrink as the object spins away from the sun. What’s most amazing is the sense of colour. This thing makes Jupiter look dowdy. Bright as a beer can thrown into space.

I’m not afraid of it. It won’t send plagues of destroying angels across the earth, or open its vial of plagues, or smash the planet apart into crumbs. It’s come here for us. For humans. And while this gift from the powers in the sky draws ever closer, we cling to the walls of our little cocoon, hairless apes squabbling about the Grateful Dead and who’s doing it with whom, and when, and where, and in what position, and who’s using whose pissing-tube. I find this tremendously reassuring. The Evolvers have come eight hundred light years to learn the concept of irony. It only took us Americans two and a half centuries.

There’s a cunning caste system in operation up here. It’s based on the length of your stubble. The smoother your pate, the lower down the order you peck. Top of the tree are the Swedes, with about three or four weeks of growth all over. It’s pernicious; I found myself acting like an old sea-dog, handing out unhelpful tips and scornful looks to the virgins up off the Jules Verne and the ESA HOTOL that docked yesterday, keeping to myself anything that might be useful or important. It’ll end in hazing rituals. I hope not to be around for that. Herd instinct and team-bonding are survival tactics in as extreme an environment as this. Space stations and jails. Even within groups, it’s shape up or ship out. I get waves of hostility from the rest of Team Green because I refuse to adopt the same spatial orientation as them in group exercises. My ‘up there’ is their ‘down here’ and vice versa. Unity Thought Police. This beef will get back to them, and I’ll be in real grief. The grapevine up here violates Special and General relativity.

There’s another kind of caste division, more deeply rooted, and that’s between Spacers and Passengers. Spacers are the crew of Unity, its construction workers, system engineers, tug and shuttle pilots, anyone who works with space as their raw material. The rest of us are Passengers. Grunts. Breathing their hard-worked-for air, pissing out their expensively recycled water, leaving our skin flakes floating in their pods and passages. They swing through the tubes like you’re not there, push in front of you when you’re in the line for the food dispenser or the John, talk over you when you are trying to record a private letter, pull you up on any one of a hundred imaginary violations of space routine that of course threaten the lives of every soul aboard, and are complete militarist Nazis who are jealous because all they do is drive the taxi, we’re the ones who get to see the show.

There’s a place I’ve discovered – I won’t call it private, because nothing is in this shell of fools – but it’s undercrowded, and it has a window on the docking area. There is a lot of free time when you’re a Passenger. With mine, I like to watch spaceships. Didn’t your friend Oksana once tell you that time spent watching airplanes is time exceedingly well spent? That goes double for space craft. There is seldom an hour that you don’t find something moored to the docking unit. Mostly they’re those brutal little SSTO robot freighters – our lifeline to the mother world, without which we really would be eating each other’s faces. I watch for the HORUSes and HOTOLs as they come out of the atmosphere blur at the edge of the world. They’re beautiful things. They seem to fly on space, surf on it, like the old Silver Surfer; that it happens in absolute silence and the slowness of Zen drama makes it all the more beautiful. To me, the tugs are the most interesting. Nothing to look at, except, I suppose, a certain fitness-for-purpose aesthetic in the ungainly agglomerations of engines, tanks, construction beams and heavy grappling arms. What fascinates me is that they’re deep space creatures. The space planes, the freighters, they’re Earth things, their job is purely to get through that layer of air. The tugs could never exist in gravity and atmosphere; they are absolutely designed for space. They interest me primarily because in a very short time I’m going to know one – or rather, the environment pods they pick up – a whole lot more intimately. They’re moving us out. Teams Yellow and Green are being rotated up to High Steel. We leave tomorrow at twenty-thirty, in two pods. I’m in the second ship. I may not have time to talk to you tomorrow – there’s quite a lot of prepping needs to be done before the flight, you spend the fifteen hours muffled up in an air bag and they reckon it’s best to knock you out for it. So it’s likely the next time I’m talking to you will be from High Steel.