Weight (6 page)

Friday, March 23rd 2001, 5:49 a.m., Pacific Ocean.

The Mir space station came home.

The Russians had loved Mir. They kept it up there through hardship and poverty, paying the bills with blustering loans and black market dollars. Since the days of the first Sputnik, the Russians loved space. It didn’t belong to America. It might one day belong to them.

It was the same old story –
boundaries, desire.

When Mir crashed into the Pacific at dawn, she landed history but the dream escaped. There it is, orbiting the world, gravity free. Free as a dream should be.

What kind of dream?

We dream we’re free.

The earth’s atmosphere extends for about a hundred kilometres above the earth’s surface. Travel upwards just a couple of miles, and you can escape gravity. Here there is no weight, only a measureless sea of space-time.

Here we are, one of nine planets revolving round a nuclear star in a spiral arm of a minor galaxy. Our sun is a hundred and fifty million kilometres away. Pluto, the outermost of the nine planets, lies six billion kilometres away from the same sun. This tiny, icy planet of change and death has never been visited, and the Greeks couldn’t see any further than Saturn. Saturn, for them, and for astrologers still, was the planet of limitation. This was the
so far and no further
planet, the warning, the boundary.

Now it seems there are no boundaries. The universe has no centre. Every limit can be crossed. Even the speed of light – 300,000 kilometres per second – is not the speed limit of the universe. If we could warp space, we could break the light barrier.

One day we’ll do it all.

For now, we’ve landed on the moon and we’ve sent BEAGLE 2 to Mars. We know so much more than Mir. We know more about outer space than anyone ever. But all we know is just the start. These are jottings, hesitations, small facts, big gaps.

Like all dreams, the details are strange.

Atlas would miss Mir. He had been watching it for years. They both watched it. It was television for him and the dog.

Laika had told Atlas all about the world he had never seen. Of course, her world stopped in 1957, and it was the Soviet Union, so Atlas thought that everyone now ate beetroot and turnip and shivered in zero temperatures in concrete apartments.

The dog said that the earth was full; soon its inhabitants would have to live in space. Atlas had got used to his own company, and he didn’t want humans he had never met flying round his face in
their tinny pods. He was a prisoner but he had rights.

They had both seen the moon landing in 1969. Atlas assumed that the men wore those ridiculous clothes because it was so cold on earth these days. He thought of the sun warming his garden, and how he had always gone barefoot. Laika assured him that no one went barefoot in Russia.

‘Where is Russia?’ said Atlas.

‘Over there,’ said Laika, wagging her tail.

Atlas looked round at the jigsaw of the earth. The pieces were continually cut and re-cut, but the picture stayed the same; a diamond blue planet, ice-capped, swirled in space. Nothing was as beautiful. Not fiery Mars nor clouded Venus, not the comets with their tails blown by solar winds.

Then Atlas had a strange thought.

Why not put it down?

What can I tell you about the choices we make?

I chose this story above all others because it’s a story I’m struggling to end. Here we are, with all the pieces in place and the final moment waiting. I reach this moment, not once, many times, have been reaching it all my life, it seems, and I find there is no resolution.

I want to tell the story again.

That’s why I write fiction – so that I can keep telling the story. I return to problems I can’t solve, not because I’m an idiot, but because the real problems can’t be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see.

Always a new beginning, a different end.

When I was a kid my parents were still living in the war.

My father had been in the D-Day landings. My mother was a young woman in 1940. They adopted me late in life, and I was raised among gas-masks and rationing. They never understood that the war was over. They remained suspicious of strangers, and kept themselves closed off in the personal air-raid shelter they called home.

My mother had a war-time revolver she hid in the duster drawer, and six bullets waxily embedded in a tin of furniture polish. When things were bad, she took out the gun and the polish and left them on the sideboard. It was sufficient.

On revolver nights, I crept to bed and switched on my light-up universe. I used to travel it, country by country, some real, others imagined, re-making the atlas as I went.

My journeys were matters of survival; crossing nights of misery into days of hope. Keeping the
light on was keeping the world going. It was a private vigil, sacred to stop things falling apart – her, me, the life I knew – however impossible – the only one.

Looking at the glowing globe, I thought that if I could only keep on telling the story, if the story would not end, I could invent my way out of the world. As a character in my own fiction, I had a chance to escape the facts. There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later;
mother
and
father
. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.

In a way I was lucky. I could not allow my parents to be the facts of my life. Their version of the story was one I could read but not write. I had to tell the story again.

I am not a Freudian. I don’t believe I can mine the strata of the past and drill out the fault-lines. There
has been too much weathering; ice ages, glacial erosion, meteor impact, plant life, dinosaurs.

The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a
book, each with a record of contemporary life written on
it. Unfortunately the record is far from complete …

My mother said we all have our cross to bear. She paraded hers like a medieval martyr, notched, gouged, bleeding. She believed in Christ, but not in his cross-bearing qualities.

She seemed to forget that he had borne the cross so that we don’t have to. Is life a gift or a burden?

What is it that you contain?

The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut.

Your first parent was a star.

I know nothing of my biological parents. They live on a lost continent of DNA. Like Atlantis, all record
of them is sunk. They are guesswork, speculation, mythology.

The only proof I have of them is myself, and what proof is that, so many times written over? Written on the body is a secret code, only visible in certain lights.

I do not know my time of birth. I am not entirely sure of the date. Having brought no world with me, I made one.

Spin the globe. What landmasses are these, unmapped, unnamed? The world evolves, first liquid and alive, then forming burning plates that must cool and set. The experiment is haphazard, toxic at times. Earth is a brinkmanship of breathtaking beauty and a mutant inferno. My own primitive life forms take a long time to web intelligence. When they are intelligent they are still angry.

For me, still, now, anger is deeper than forgiveness. My red-hot monsters aren’t extinct. I’ve kept their Jurassic forest, hidden but complete. They’re still
there, jawed, plated, furious. The sky is purple-brown.

I am, of course, homo sapiens, at least on paper.

Spin the globe. If oxygen falls below fifteen percent of air volume, I can hardly move. If it rises above twenty- five percent, I and my world conflagrate. Homeostasis of my planet is hard work. I swing between one extreme and another, constantly threatening my stability. I am always in danger of self-destruction.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Oxygen is carcinogenic and likely puts a limit on our life span. It would be unwise though, to try to extend life by not breathing at all.

Which of us doesn’t do it? Either we loll in anaerobic stupor, too afraid to fill our lungs with risky beauty, or we roll out fire like dragons, destroying the world we love.

I try not to burn up my world with rage.

It is so hard.

Spin the globe. When I made it, it was small as a ball. I carried it on a stick over my shoulder. I was the fool, new and careless. I didn’t know that worlds are on the Planck scale – infinitesimally tiny, exploding to grow.

It grew. It utilised free energy from the sun. It learned to break the oxygen-carbon compounds. It started a life of its own.

I used my world like a crystal ball, gazing into it, looking for clues. I loved its independence, the unknownness of it, but like everything you birth, it gradually becomes too big to carry.

It’s on my back now, vast and expanding. I hardly recognise it. I love it. I hate it. It’s not me, it’s itself. Where am I in the world I have made?

Where in the world am I?

About five billion years ago, the material that now makes up the sun and the planets was a great cloud of dust called the Solar Nebula. This material was a
mixture of light elements, like hydrogen and helium, along with heavier elements thrown out by an earlier generation of brief stars. A shock wave or an exploding star prompted the nebula to condense into a galaxy of proto-stars.

In one of these proto-stars, material concentrated to form the proto-sun. Gas and dust around it collected into a flat rotating disc. Over the next thousand years or so, the disc cooled, and grains of solid matter began to freeze. In the hot inner region, they were silicate rocks. Further out, there was watery ice, and further out yet, frozen methane. These grains moulded themselves into mile-long lumps, bumping, breaking, colliding, but sometimes co-operating to form the planets.

The four planets closest to the Sun – Mercury Venus, Mars and Earth – are small rocky worlds. The next four planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, are gas giants. Pluto is more like a moon
than a planet. There is no life except here. Planet Earth.
The Almost, the Proto, the Maybe
. Planet Earth, that wanted life so badly, she got it.

Beside me, the lamp still glows. Here I am, turning and turning the lit-up globe, leaning on the limits of myself.

What limits? There are none. The story moves at the speed of light, and like light, the story is curved. There are no straight lines. The lines that smooth across the page, deceive. Straightforward is not the geometry of space. In space, nothing tends directly; matter and matter of fact both warp under light.

If only I understood that the globe itself, complete, perfect, unique, is a story. Science is a story. History is a story. These are the stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves come true.

What am I?
Atoms
.

What are atoms?
Empty space and points of light
.

What is the speed of light?
300,000 kilometres per
second.

What is a second?
That depends where in the Universe
you set your watch
.

Let me crawl out from under this world I have made. It doesn’t need me any more.

Strangely, I don’t need it either. I don’t need the weight. Let it go. There are reservations and regrets, but let it go.

I want to tell the story again.

Long ago, this violent planet of radioactive rock had learned to become home.

Atlas had loved the earth; the crumble of soil between his fingers, the budding of spring, the slow fruit of autumn. Change.

Now the earth changed but Atlas had stayed still, feeling the tilted axis rotate against his shoulder blades. All his strength was focussed into holding up the world. He hardly knew what movement was any more. No matter that he shifted slightly for comfort. The monstrous weight decided everything.

Why?

Why not just put it down?

Atlas let his hands go from the sides of the world. Nothing happened.

Atlas put his hands down in front of him on the floor of the universe or the ceiling of stars, I don’t know which, and then he stretched out his left leg so that he was kneeling on all fours, the Kosmos balanced on his back. Laika was running in and out of his spread fingers. She had never seen her master move.

Atlas crawled forward and then suddenly fell flat on his face with hands over his ears and the dog clinging on to his thumb. Atlas waited, rigid with doom. The dog waited, her nose in her paws.

Nothing happened.

Write it more substantially
–
NOTHING
.

Atlas raised his head, turned over, stood up, stepped back. The dog’s nose lifted. Atlas looked back at his burden. There was no burden. There was only the diamond-blue earth gardened in a wilderness of space.

All that we can see is only a fraction of the universe.

Some matter is detectable only by its gravitational effects
on the rotation of galaxies. This is called dark matter and
no one knows its composition. Dark matter could be conventional
matter, like the small stars called Brown Dwarfs, or
it could even be black holes.

Or it could be Atlas holding up the universe.

But I think it is Atlas and Laika walking away.

Jeanette Winterson’s first novel,
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
, won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel. Since then, she has published seven other novels, including
The Passion, Written on the Body
and
The PowerBook
, a collection of short stories,
The World and Other Places
, a book of essays,
Art Objects
and a children’s picture book,
The King of Capri
. She has adapted her work for TV, film and stage. Her books are published in 32 countries. She lives in Oxfordshire and London.