White mice

The first to burn is the Fair Maid of Kent, then Ashmead’s Kernel. Next are the Cox Pippin and Russets,  swallowed in flames.  You always believed that wisdom and immortality might lurk here, a stray seed from the Gardens of Eden or Hesperides. It was here you showed me how to cut an apple crossways to reveal the star. Today the river snakes around the hill and hisses. I see nothing in the old orchard but genetic mutations. The bark blisters under my gaze. I lit the fires.

A vault of perfect blue is the backdrop for an umbilical column of smoke twisting upwards. As a scientist, I know the sky is an illusion. Light bent and scattered to create the colour of summer, jeans and oceans. The same materials that fashioned your eyes. Apples explode and trees fold like abandoned lovers. Even the rocks seem to melt like ice. I thought they were permanent fixtures, but then I said the same about you.

Finally, it’s over. I survey the wreckage. Civilisation reduced to a lingering sweet scent. The crescent moon hangs above like a sickle. Perhaps the moon was once as green as an apple. I wonder if it could be again?

•

You passed the medical, there shouldn’t be a problem.

That simple sentence repeats in my head. We approach the Shuttle, its nose vertical. They call it the erection. A massive phallus aimed into space. Who knows where my blood’s gone, there’s certainly none in my legs. Of the several possible destinations, Europa was the scientific community’s favoured choice. Yet we travel to Mars. The politicians felt it was a better target. My task is to manufacture a new world on a barren planet. It would be easier if we could find an untouched paradise to gradually poison, but we don’t have that luxury. The limits of our frail bodies force us to start in this tiny solar system.

My colleague laughs. He has no fear. That should be encouraging since he’s the pilot. All the same, I like a little humility from those in control.  He’s a veteran of two missions, and told me that by the time I board there should be no doubts. Have a sleepless night a month before, he said, and then decide. In or out, and don’t look back. He tells me that lift-off can be an enlightening moment, a time of faith. There’s no such thing as God. This is one fact of which I’m certain.

We go up in the elevator. I’ve done this before, in the rehearsals. On those days the place is packed with engineers, electricians, and glamorous PR people. Today it feels like one of those fertility waiting rooms we used to visit. Nobody wants to be seen, and the few people in attendance won’t look you in the eye.

Our escort to the Shuttle are dressed in white like doctors, with that bland expression that says they’ve seen it all before. I’m not sure why we need an escort. We know the way. We’re hardly likely to mess with the delicate equipment enroute, but it feels like we can’t be trusted, like a man in a gynae ward.

Inside, the escorts strap us into position, as though we’re being fixed on an operating table. They pull the straps tighter and tighter, occasionally asking if they’re tight enough, then yanking them harder no matter what we say. When I can’t move, they lower my helmet. For a few seconds  I gasp for air, as though I’m being suffocated. Our pilot notices. Probably everyone does. This is being televised live to more than 80 million people. When I say live, I mean near-real time. There’s a 30-second delay so you won’t see us roasting if we fail. A buzz of static indicates the intercom is active. The pilot comes online.

‘Keep breathing. We’ve got plenty of time yet. Need to give the boys a while to get four miles clear before they light the fuse.’

I have to give a sharp reply back, to show I’m in control. For my brother to hear, for my friends, and most of all for you. I know you’ll watch, even though you don’t want to.

I pick my words carefully and say, ‘Ungh.’

‘Glad to see gravity still holding on to that tongue,’ our pilot says. ‘It’ll function in zero-g.’

NASA were very clear at the conference to explain nobody would have any alcohol in their blood stream. A 72-hour ban is enforced. The press spread rumours that we had an alternative. Everyone assumes we’re on drugs to reduce the chance of a massive coronary. Of course, that’s all bollocks. I need a drink, right now. A brandy. A double. What sane person wouldn’t let us do that? We’re strapped to the biggest bomb on Earth. We’ve seen the videos of previous catastrophes, watched the footage repeatedly, and answered a continuous stream of press questions on the subject.

‘T-minus seven minutes.’ The dock-arm swings away, leaving us without an escape route.

NASA are the experts. Don’t think about the little ceramic tiles or the glue. Strong glue, new glue, better glue, super glue. You passed the medical, there shouldn’t be a problem. Shouldn’t.  What kind of word is that? A few minutes and it’ll be over. So many people would like to be here right now, instead of me. If only they were.

You once told me before the laparoscopy, that you felt like a sacrifice to the gods. I understand that now. I’m strapped to a table in my ceremonial costume, the funeral pyre built around me. Priests chant over the intercom, waiting for the audience crescendo before they thrust the flaming brand beneath us. One way or another I’ll be a messenger to the stars.

Focus on a positive memory, anything. Not the silence in the scanner room. Not that argument I started, or the orchard burning.  A poem.

If you can keep your head when others are shouting obscenities,

if you can have a son that survives longer than twelve weeks,

if you can remember a poem’s words before a moment of almost certain death,

if you can remain faithful when life disintegrates,

then you’re a better man than me.

‘T-minus three minutes. Hang in there kids.’ The controls are checked for full and free movement, and everything begins to shake, me included.

Twenty successful launches without a problem. Here’s another statistic. One in 100 ERPCs go wrong. ERPC: Evacuation of the Retained Products of Conception. One in a thousand get a complication. One in two hundred suffer irreversible damage from that complication. That’s what they told us. Each time there was another chance, a fresh statistic filled with possibilities.  Each time you and I nodded, knowing we would be the one. We only lost a child. Barely a child, a black hole on a scan. I knew as soon as the nurse fell silent, as soon as I saw the scanner’s image. Elementary physics. Nothing can escape a black hole. Not light, not even hope.

There’s always jargon to make it sound better. Asherman’s syndrome, loose ceramic tiles, viscosity, foam malfunction, motility, escape velocity, nodules and event horizons. The statistics are dusted off to reassure us, and they’re always lies. You can tell because the numbers are so perfectly round: 1 in 100 not 1 in 92. And where are the questions about the determining factors: our age, the massive inexperience of the expert, his previous record of failure? The statistics are learnt by rote. Who refreshes the numbers, who checks them, who does anything if you complain?

Everyone knows the answer to that.

‘T-minus 2 minutes.’

So here I am. One man selected from eight billion to plant the seeds for a new generation. My name teetering on legend. Leaving behind a pile of ashes and a childless marriage that burnt-out. Testosterone running wild, father of a whole new world. Is that why I agreed to terraform Mars, as an ego trip? I don’t know. They picked me.

I learnt this week that space craft are expected to break. Mission Control say they’ve never had a deep space operation that didn’t require corrections. The key is to make things flexible. Everything must be capable of receiving patches, adapting, being repurposed. Engineers are the heroes. We’re only white mice. Mission Control anticipate failure. They plan for it. We should have done the same.

‘T-minus one minute and counting.’

Our pilot told me the sun is hotter than we imagine. You can feel it reach for you he said, seeping through layers of shielding and air-conditioning. Night will be different too. I used to think black was simply an absence of light, the colour of caves and predatory eyes. I thought there could be no blackness like space, far removed from any light pollution.

I was wrong. You sensed that before me. Black is the colour of emptiness, void, it’s a space sucked clean of dreams.

Then there are the millions of stars, sharp and brilliant, plus the comets with white tails blazing through space, harbouring life. Spermatozoa metaphors waiting to remind me of my failings.

‘T-minus thirty one seconds.’ Oxygen and hydrogen are flowing to the engines now.

We may explode into a fireball, or slowly fade as we journey to Mars, the sun shrinking day by day as our vessel gets colder and the life support systems begin to fail. A sudden end or a gradual decline.  Is that how it was for our child?

My thoughts are tangled. I dream of floating, although there’s no air only ice in my lungs. In some dreams I curl into a ball, colder than rock. Other times I burn like a sun. Or should that be a son?

I want to taste that white chocolate ice-cream we bought in San Gimignano.

I want to smell the velvet Amarone we drank in Venice.

I want to watch you undress for the first time, again.

‘Ten, nine, eight …’

After the launch, you’ll drive to the orchard. You’d feel it was an intrusion to go before. He’ll be with you, holding your hand. You must be swollen now, only two months left to go. The third trimester is the hardest, they say. You’ll feel tired, the endorphins giving way to fatigue. He’ll say you’ve never looked more beautiful, but how would he know?

The ashes will be a shock. My email said I left you everything, but you’ll feel I left nothing. My anger consuming the orchard, as it did our marriage.

‘Seven, six …’ The engines start to howl.

They told us we would never have a family. The evidence was compelling, the facts irrefutable. The damaged womb had bare millimetres of blood-saturated lining, too thin for the blastocyst to implant. You knew my scientific gods didn’t permit miracles.

‘Science has ruthless gods,’ you said. ‘Uncaring, ignorant of anything outside a narrow sphere of knowledge, obsessive and blinkered, inhuman.’

‘That’s what makes them gods,’ I said.

‘Have faith,’ you pleaded.

I know you feel sorry for me. I don’t need sympathy. I said we could never have children. There was an implication in that sentence but neither of us wanted to spell it out. I still have to believe that we never could. I rationalise there must have been some incompatibility, a mismatch of genes too small for the relatively unsophisticated tests to identify.

‘Five, four, three, two …’

When you stand on the ashen hill, and shake your fist at the sky, you’ll see a green tendril pushing through the ground. Life clinging to the remnants of a devastated landscape. You may see it as a sign. You’ll laugh, and think that I never imagined this.

I know that life returns stronger from the ashes. Fire liberates minerals and chemicals locked up in rigid trees, and provides phosphorous and nitrogen. It grants the sun fresh access to the ground, kills bacteria, and releases a burst of growth from the roots. The black ash retains heat and helps germinate seeds, and even older trees with mortal wounds can survive for three years, producing more seeds than ever before in an astonishing burst of fecundity.

‘One, ignition.’

Twice now, I have had to burn the ground. May the green shoots blossom and fruit.

That’s my prayer.