the radiators blazing in the sunlight and then the solar arrays and the wholeof the ISS as he continued to move up and away from it all, the motion of his lifting and the distances below him seeming to shift as he watched. One zero eight-point-five, this line he moved along, the axis of the truss line crossing the modules at seventy-three meters and the point of motion that was himself and the full nitrogen tank he held in his outstretched hand, that point moving along the parabolic arc, mapped along a path he could see as if it existed only as a graph on a sheet of paper. One zero eight-point-five, each number before him, not just the total but the graduated divisions that marked off the measurements as if some enormous thermometer marked by regularly spaced red lines.
“How’s it look up there?” Stevens said.
He paused before answering. Then he said, “MS-2, visual clean and clear.”
“Yeah, but how does it look?”
“It looks … ,” he said. Then he paused again. There were no words. The whole of the station like an enormous winged insect and the arm swinging him backwards above it so that the farthest reaches of the truss and the huge black rectangles of the solar arrays flashed and reflected their darkness to him, diminishing as he moved, knowing what was below even when he could not see it, as if points on a map or a grid, points denoted clearly and plainly by their coordinates. The names shuttled by—the Mobile Servicing System, the S0 truss segment and then the Unity Node, the Columbus Module, the Destiny Lab—objects named to denote the idea of their most perfect state of being, as if already clarified by their purpose or by the purpose they had been set forth to fulfill and all of them designed by other engineers, other mathematicians. He moved above them, pressing toward the apex of that motion where the parabolic curve would shift from zero to one, all of it visible now: the various modules where they clustered below him and the black mirrors of the solar arrays where they connected to the long crisscrossing trusses, each shape outlined and ringed in blue lines and arrows, the numbers circling and ringingand indicating and denoting their symbolic values. The numbers of the machine. The perfect machine.
Then Mort Stevens’s voice in his helmet: “You still with me, Keith?”
“Hang on,” he said. Then, “I wish … I wish you could see this. It’s amazing here.” Not even aware of whom he was addressing. He thought he would actually tear up, that he would actually cry. Not because of the mission or because he had accomplished everything he had set out to do but because what he could see in that moment was so stunning in its beauty and purity and complexity that it could not be believed. Everything within the angle of his vision rendered infinite. My god. Below him spun the bulge of South America where the brown and muddy Amazon emptied into the Atlantic and a swirl of clouds that ran under the Destiny Module like a dust mote swirling under a piece of furniture: green and brown continents and blue oceans and white clouds and above it all: the clear and precise white and black of the station and the robotic arm itself where it moved in umbilical perspective down to the Kibo Module, the ISS, those oxygen-filled tubes in which they worked and lived. And Keith Corcoran: floating above it all.
Already Earth returning to its forty-five minutes and thirty seconds of night as he moved in the orbit path, the coming of darkness like some lightning eclipse, and he pulled one hand free—not even thinking now, for perhaps the first time in his life completely without thought—and clicked off the light of his helmet and peered into the multicolored glow of space itself. All his life the numbers in his mind arrayed in some black substance that was this substance, this dark matter, and now here it was and he stood on a platform and was raised up into it as if into some pool that drifted not below him but
“How’s it look up there?” Stevens said.
He paused before answering. Then he said, “MS-2, visual clean and clear.”
“Yeah, but how does it look?”
“It looks … ,” he said. Then he paused again. There were no words. The whole of the station like an enormous winged insect and the arm swinging him backwards above it so that the farthest reaches of the truss and the huge black rectangles of the solar arrays flashed and reflected their darkness to him, diminishing as he moved, knowing what was below even when he could not see it, as if points on a map or a grid, points denoted clearly and plainly by their coordinates. The names shuttled by—the Mobile Servicing System, the S0 truss segment and then the Unity Node, the Columbus Module, the Destiny Lab—objects named to denote the idea of their most perfect state of being, as if already clarified by their purpose or by the purpose they had been set forth to fulfill and all of them designed by other engineers, other mathematicians. He moved above them, pressing toward the apex of that motion where the parabolic curve would shift from zero to one, all of it visible now: the various modules where they clustered below him and the black mirrors of the solar arrays where they connected to the long crisscrossing trusses, each shape outlined and ringed in blue lines and arrows, the numbers circling and ringingand indicating and denoting their symbolic values. The numbers of the machine. The perfect machine.
Then Mort Stevens’s voice in his helmet: “You still with me, Keith?”
“Hang on,” he said. Then, “I wish … I wish you could see this. It’s amazing here.” Not even aware of whom he was addressing. He thought he would actually tear up, that he would actually cry. Not because of the mission or because he had accomplished everything he had set out to do but because what he could see in that moment was so stunning in its beauty and purity and complexity that it could not be believed. Everything within the angle of his vision rendered infinite. My god. Below him spun the bulge of South America where the brown and muddy Amazon emptied into the Atlantic and a swirl of clouds that ran under the Destiny Module like a dust mote swirling under a piece of furniture: green and brown continents and blue oceans and white clouds and above it all: the clear and precise white and black of the station and the robotic arm itself where it moved in umbilical perspective down to the Kibo Module, the ISS, those oxygen-filled tubes in which they worked and lived. And Keith Corcoran: floating above it all.
Already Earth returning to its forty-five minutes and thirty seconds of night as he moved in the orbit path, the coming of darkness like some lightning eclipse, and he pulled one hand free—not even thinking now, for perhaps the first time in his life completely without thought—and clicked off the light of his helmet and peered into the multicolored glow of space itself. All his life the numbers in his mind arrayed in some black substance that was this substance, this dark matter, and now here it was and he stood on a platform and was raised up into it as if into some pool that drifted not below him but
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