Wonders of a Godless World

by Andrew McGahan

  The urgency in his tone reached her dimly. What did he mean? What had happened? Should she get up? Go to him?

  No. Don’t come here. Not yet.

  But he sounded so worried.

  We must expedite matters, that’s all. I have to tell you about my fifth and final life, right now, while I have the chance.

  Was there the time for that? If something was wrong…

  We have a few hours yet, I think. And it’s important that you hear the full story before…well, before we go on.

  His final life, the orphan noted. The life he’d lived before arriving at her hospital. And of all his lives, this was the one she’d been waiting to hear. It would answer her secret questions about where he’d been twenty-one years ago; whether he’d come anywhere near her island before now; or near her mother…

  But then for some reason she was suddenly thinking about the archangel and the virgin. Why, she had left them just lying there in the dayroom. She hadn’t even dressed them. And if the nurses found them that way…

  They have not been discovered. Forget about them.

  Obediently, the orphan forgot. A wave of sleepiness washed over her again, and all sense of urgency faded. It was so comfortable there on the bed. Maybe it was only a dream anyway. But his voice was lovely. She could listen to him forever. To this story, and to any other story that he wanted to tell her.

  It won’t take forever. And this is my last story.

  Now, I drowned, but you know that I did not truly die from the drowning—that indeed I cannot truly die from anything. Nor, when I let myself be swept off that cliff, as insane as I was, did I expect to truly die. I was surrendering to the world, that was all, to its power and its terror. And it was wonderful while it lasted.

  But it was only a temporary release, as these moments of passion must always be. And afterwards, inevitably, comes the regret and the dissatisfaction. In my case, it began in the form of a net dangling behind a small fishing trawler. I was dragged up rudely from the depths and deposited on the bloody deck, gasping amid a hundred other sea creatures—a rebirth for me, even as they died. The fishermen were terrified, not surprisingly. I was not pretty to look at. I don’t know how long I’d floated down there in the darkness, but it was long enough; my skin had dissolved and fish had chewed away my extremities. I was screaming. They hid me below and made for land.

  Once ashore, however, I recovered as I always had before. More slowly than those other times, perhaps, but just as surely. And for a while I let myself be distracted by the healing, and then by all the business of establishing my new identity, and regaining control of my finances. But eventually the formalities were complete, and there I was. Alive again. And that’s when the real disillusionment set in.

  For what was I to do now that I hadn’t done before?

  Where was I to go that I hadn’t already been?

  I’d tried, ever since my first death in the landslide, to come to terms with the earth and what it had done to me. But every time I thought I’d found resolution, an accommodation with the natural world, it had turned on me and destroyed me.

  As a simple goatherd, working the earth and minding my own business, it destroyed me. As a delver into the earth and a developer of its wealth, it destroyed me. As a servant and defender of the earth, it destroyed me. And as a hermit, an aesthete, a denier of the earth—again the planet had not let me be. Can you imagine how trapped I felt, looking back over those lives? How hollow and cruel it all seemed, my immortality? How could I ever win? Where on earth—quite literally—could I go to be free? There was nowhere. I was imprisoned within the four walls of the globe.

  And then, one night, in my despair, I turned my eyes to the heavens, and beheld a pinpoint of light sailing across the sky. It was a manmade light—not a plane, but something much higher up, beyond the atmosphere. A satellite. Already a familiar enough sight, even then. This was two years after man had walked on the moon.

  But watching that satellite, I had my answer. If I was indeed a prisoner on this earth, then perhaps I could break out of the prison…and go into space.

  Are you laughing at me, orphan?

  No, of course not. You have no knowledge of mechanical space travel and the difficulties it entails. But you would be right to scorn my presumption, because in that moment I swore I would go into deep space, beyond the moon, and beyond even the other planets. Out of earth’s sight, and out of earth’s clutches. Which was ridiculous. At the time, even the moon was scarcely within mankind’s reach. The idea of humans travelling beyond it was only a fantasy. The reality lay decades off in the future, at best…

  Yes, but remember, what did decades matter to me? I had as many decades as I needed. I could wait. If it took a hundred years for man to range out to the other planets, I reasoned, then so be it. And if it took another century again to go beyond the solar system, well, what of that? I could be there to see it all, if I chose.

  I drew up, thus, some very long-term plans. My first step was to move to the country that was most vigorously pursuing space travel—the country that had put men on the moon. It was a place I knew well anyway, from previous lives. Then I returned to university and began a whole new round of studies. Mathematics and aeronautics and biomechanics and a half-dozen other disciplines. It took time, but I had no shortage of time. I was young. My body was brand new, a whole life ahead of it yet.

  Nor was I trying to leap into space with a single bound. In those days it was only a chosen few who made it into orbit anyway. For the moment I would be content with a role upon the ground. When my studies were complete, I took up a research position with the national body that oversaw space travel. And there I worked away quietly for the next two decades. Yes, a full twenty years. You see what I mean by long term…

  My speciality—and this will not surprise you, orphan, knowing my ulterior interest in the whole endeavour—was the question of how humans would survive for the long periods that extended space travel would involve. Not merely orbiting for a week or two, like the space shuttles, but going interplanetary, or even interstellar. Journeys that could take years. Or possibly centuries. To put it in terms of my own situation—how was a man like me to live, once he had succeeded in escaping the earth?

  The simple answer is that, to survive, a man must take a little of the earth with him—air and food and water and heat. Which is fine in itself. Spaceships can carry tons of supplies, if needed. The only issue there is one of fuel. But beyond those necessities, our bodies are also specifically adapted to gravity, to certain radiation levels, to magnetic fields—and these things are not so easy to pack into a spaceship. There are sociological issues too regarding the behaviour of small crews isolated on long voyages. Hostility and paranoia can set in. Cabin fever. Conflict. Still, to me, all those problems were essentially solvable. I was more concerned with yet another complication, one more subtle and yet potentially more devastating than the rest, that had arisen during the early space flights.

  I called it the separation syndrome.

  I knew of it from only a handful of cases, because only a handful of astronauts had gone far enough into space to experience it. I’m talking about the twenty-four men who went to the moon. Even they only hinted at it. But to a specialist such as myself, those hints set loud alarm bells ringing about the psychological hazards of space.

  What the astronauts said was this—when they reached the moon and looked back at the earth, they felt one powerful emotion above all.

  Loneliness.

  Oh, that’s not the word they used—it’s not a word they were trained to use. But it’s what they meant. They looked back and saw how far they were from everything and everyone they knew, and a brief but utterly piercing bout of homesickness took hold of them. They felt small, they felt desolate, they felt alone. And for a few seconds of doubt, in their deepest hearts, they wondered if they might die.

  Die!

  Now—these were individuals far too disciplined to dwell on their fears, or to allo
w such intangible phantoms to unman them for long. But they all noted it, in one fashion or another. And yet they had travelled only as far as the moon, only a few days’ journey away, where the earth was still visible and bright and blue.

  What, I wondered, would happen when men looked back at earth longingly from a month’s journey away, or a year’s? When the planet was only a speck in space, without dimension or colour? Or worse, when the planet was so far away that it was lost completely, invisible across the void? How piercing would the homesickness be then, how crippling the loneliness, how overpowering the fear?

  My modelling—lacking data, admittedly—showed frightening trends. It showed astronauts on interplanetary journeys reduced to acute depression and psychosis, to panic and dysfunction. I began to theorise that perhaps not merely a man’s body was dependent upon the earth, but that maybe his consciousness was dependent upon the earth as well. That our awareness was fundamentally enmeshed with the planet. So enmeshed indeed that it might not only be extremely distressing for humans to travel far from earth, it might actually be lethal to us. It might kill the mind and the spirit to be taken too far from home. And if so, then the implications for space exploration…

  And the implications for me! After everything I’d been through, to find out that my planned escape might be a mortally doomed exercise!

  I needed to know more, so I commenced new studies of astronauts. Ideally, I would have liked to observe and analyse crews who were going at least as far as the moon—but alas, those days were gone. The only missions we were sending beyond earth’s orbit anymore were unmanned craft, and they had no feelings to report.

  Instead, I turned to the crews of the shuttles, and later the space station, and designed physical and psychological experiments for them to carry out. Officially, I was researching the long-term effects of microgravity. But privately—for I had not yet shared my fears—I was investigating the separation syndrome. True, these astronauts were so close to earth that the syndrome was barely in play—only two hundred miles stood between them and the planet—but I had nothing else to work with. Year after year went by and no definitive answer came. I felt I was peering blindly into the darkness.

  The turn of the century arrived. In fact, of the millennium. I had lived to see a new age. It was almost thirty years since I’d drowned, and eighty-nine since I’d first died under the landslide. But then something remarkable occurred. My employers came to me and offered me a place on a shuttle flight, to run my own experiments, first hand.

  I hadn’t expected that. Not so soon. My own plan had been to wait for more advanced forms of space travel. I would feign old age before then, and retire, and move away. I would change my name and appearance, and then return afresh to the space program, unrecognised by anyone. And only then would I fly into space, and search for the stars. The future was what mattered. A place on a shuttle mission served no purpose of mine at all.

  Ah, but how could I refuse? You and I, orphan, may have flown beyond the atmosphere solely by our own willpower, but alone I was not capable of such a feat—not then. I had never experienced space, only dreamt of it.

  I forgot all about the future, and said yes.

  It didn’t happen immediately. There were two years of astronaut training to get through first, and then delays with the launch. But finally—only a few short months ago now, and how strange that seems—I found myself strapped to a seat in the crew section of a space shuttle, listening to the last seconds of countdown.

  Then came ignition. Then lift-off. And, at last, ascent.

  But what a brutal process it was! For all my preparation, I hadn’t really understood the violence it takes to rip a craft free of the planet’s grasp. All I could do was grit my teeth and endure as the shuttle shook and kicked and twisted, labouring for eight endless minutes against gravity and the atmosphere. There was a small window visible from my seat, and through it I watched the sky outside turn deeper and deeper shades of blue, until finally it was black, and we had broken through into space. Then the engines cut out, and the imaginary hooks that had been sunk into my shoulder blades, hauling me down, finally let loose. And that’s when…well, when everything changed.

  Microgravity is the correct term. But what a heartless name that is for a state so transformative to a human being—for a creature born to eternal weight to suddenly be weightless! Oh, true, others around me, in those initial moments, grew nauseous and faint because of it. But I felt fine. More than fine, I felt exultant. Some would have said it was only the blood rushing to my brain in zero gravity, yet it wasn’t that. I was a prisoner tasting freedom for the very first time, I was a bird taking wing.

  However, there was no time just then for mere awe and wonder. We had work to do. There were experiments to be unpacked and set up and initiated—the first few hours passed by in a blur. The first few days, in fact. And anyway, I soon learnt that living in a shuttle is hardly as dreamlike as floating free in space itself.

  For one thing, it’s noisy. There’s no insulation around all the valves and pumps that keep the shuttle functioning—insulation would be extra weight—so every clang and gurgle is painfully loud. And it’s smelly too. Washing facilities are limited, and yet people sweat and stink the same way they do on earth. The toilet, technical wonder that it may be, is not exactly airtight when it comes to odours—and microgravity plays hell with human digestion, the result of which is farting. A lot of farting.

  Still, occasionally I found time to float and spin for no other reason than the simple joy of it. And more importantly, I eventually managed to press my face to a window and—for one long uninterrupted hour—stare at the earth spinning below. Now…I’d read all the reports of those who had been in space before me, and I was familiar with the emotions that those men and women had experienced when they’d gazed upon the earth for the first time from afar. They always talked of the ethereal beauty of the planet, of its delicacy and uniqueness, of its soft glow and of the gossamer thinness of its atmosphere.

  It wasn’t like that for me. Looking down I saw beauty, yes, but not the beauty of an eggshell jewel—I saw the beauty of an immensely powerful beast. I saw the hard, carved faces of the continents, and the inexorable currents of the oceans flowing. I felt the atmosphere humming with electricity, and the inside of the planet bursting with suppressed heat. I sensed what a savage thing the world really is—strong, hot, and driven by systems so vast that they dwarf mankind and all his works to nullity.

  In short, I saw the monster that has toyed with me these last ninety-two years. But for once I was safe from it. No landslide could reach me up there on the shuttle. No fumes from beneath a lake could float so high. No downdraft could blast me with furnace winds, no ocean wave could mesmerise me and sweep me away. Oh, the earth held me fast in orbit still, it’s true, but otherwise, just for once, it could not touch me.

  So I felt no loneliness as I gazed down. I felt no hopelessness or homesickness. All I felt was a dizzying relief. That, and the desire to be even further away; to be on a spacecraft, racing to the outer edge of the solar system; to watch the giant globe dwindle to a blue marble, and then to a pinpoint, and then to nothing at all.

  From that moment on I scarcely cared about my experiments and tests. What concern of mine was it if other people would have trouble leaving the planet? I knew now that, when the time came, I would have no difficulty. The separation syndrome was a problem for lesser minds, and for lesser beings than myself. Oh, I performed the minimum duties required of me, I ran my tests and recorded my results. But I did no more.

  I confess that I became a little strange. A week in, I felt so detached from earth it was a struggle to remember that other people still lived down here. Even video links didn’t help—the world they showed seemed too weird. People could not float at will down here, rooms were deformed by oddities like floors and ceilings, and every movement looked heavy and sluggish and wrong. I was so much more at home in space. In my mind it was already my natural environment, a
nd where I would spend my eternity.

  But all too soon, the sixteen days were up. My tests were done, the mission complete. I did not want to go. But I comforted myself, as I packed my things away and we manoeuvred for re-entry, that at least my return to earth would be only temporary. I would see space again one day. I had savoured release now, and there was nothing the planet could do about that. Its long dominion over me was broken.

  I’ve beaten you, I cried silently from my seat, staring at the little window. We were descending into the atmosphere, and on the other side of the glass the fires of re-entry were already beginning to glow. I’ve beaten you!

  The glare outside grew brighter and brighter.

  And brighter still.

  And then…

  What a shooting star we must have made. One hundred tons of space shuttle, disintegrating across the daylight heavens.

  I don’t really remember it. The concussion of breaking up at the speed we were travelling was far too severe. I have the dimmest recollection of the shuttle slewing sideways, and then a series of hammer blows and…well, then nothing.

  I awoke to find myself tumbling through air. If it can be called waking. I was blind, and deaf. I could taste flesh burning, and I knew somehow that a wind was howling about me, but there was no other feeling from any part of my body. Looking back, I can only assume I had no body—that most of it was gone, burnt away even beyond pain. I must have been little more than a charred lump of bone and calcified tissue, a smoking piece of hardened debris arcing down from the main fireball. A human meteorite…

  Then came another concussion, and I was in water. I tasted salt. It was the ocean. But I had no arms left with which to swim, and no body fat left with which to float, so I continued to fall, sinking into the depths. I didn’t mind. The ocean had welcomed me before. But even as I sank, there came a stinging that grew into intense pain. It was my skin, beginning to knit itself anew. My immortality had been strained to breaking point, yes, but my body was already beginning its recovery. I drifted away then, before the agony became too great, and rolled in the comfortable darkness for a time.