Orbital
by Samantha Harvey
Contents
Orbit 1, ascending
Overview
Roman marks another morning in orbit by watching sunrise over Africa and by counting days and routines to keep time from “shredding” his sense of self. Shaun, waking with an aftertaste of dreaming, lingers over a Las Meninas postcard from his wife that reframes how perspective and meaning can shift. The crew’s focus turns to grief after Chie learns her mother has died, deepening their shared fixation on Earth as “Mother” and on their dependence on the planet below.
Summary
Roman wakes early and drifts to the lab window, urgently orienting himself by the land below. In darkness he spots Johannesburg and Pretoria, then watches sunrise flare over Central and East Africa, a dawn that arrives and vanishes in seconds as daylight spreads across the continent.
He counts what time means in orbit: this is his 434th day in space across three missions and day 88 of the current one, with thousands of sunrises and sunsets still to come. He keeps a written tally to “tether” time because, without numbering days, the mind’s centre begins to drift; training has taught him to anchor himself to Coordinated Universal Time even as the station loops the planet sixteen times in one “day.”
As the near-full moon hangs low against the atmosphere, Roman briefly imagines returning to his Moscow bedroom and seeing the same moon like a souvenir, but the immediacy of the view from orbit erases the domestic picture. The chapter then shifts to Shaun’s memory of a school lesson on Velázquez’s Las Meninas—a puzzle of subject and viewpoint—and to the postcard Shaun’s future wife later gave him, then annotated years afterward with the teacher’s explanation.
Waking now, Shaun finds himself staring at that postcard in his crew quarters, carrying a residue of unfinished dreaming. As he moves toward coffee, he looks down at Oman, the Arabian Sea, the Indus Estuary, and Karachi, and the sight recalls the geometric doodles he once drew.
At “six in the morning,” the crew rises with a sharpened sense of Earth as a parent: they repeatedly feel like children in their regulated routines and floating bodies. That feeling intensifies after Chie revealed on Friday that her mother has died; Pietro wordlessly takes her hands, Shaun freezes mid-task, and Nell struggles for questions. Since then, circling the planet, they return to the same unavoidable thought—mother—and, unable to truly console Chie in orbit, they look down at Earth’s radiance and feel how utterly dependent they are on it, even imagining the planet’s beauty as something like an afterlife.
Who Appears
- RomanCosmonaut; wakes early, watches African sunrise, and tallies days to anchor time.
- ShaunAstronaut; recalls a Las Meninas lesson and studies a postcard his wife annotated.
- ChieAstronaut; reveals her mother has died, intensifying the crew’s sense of Earth as mother.
- PietroCrewmate; responds to Chie’s news by floating to her and taking her hands.
- NellCrewmate; reacts with halting questions, unsure how to address Chie’s grief.
- Shaun's wifeAppears in memory; gives Shaun a Las Meninas postcard and later writes its analysis.
- Roman's wifeAppears in Roman’s imagined return home, linked to his longing for Moscow and the moon.