ORBITERS
Trevor Ritland
The last time that the monarchs came across the border, mi bisabuela was just a little girl. The October that she died, she told me all about them — took me on her knee while my brothers helped my father with the salvage. She told me about the time she found the place they went to spend the winter, high in the oyamel fir mountains above her family’s homestead; there had been a hundred thousand of them, orange wings like pockets of gold hidden in the treetops. When she told this story, I could almost feel the chill of frost, could almost see the dusty forewings folded in shadow among the distant branches. By the time that I was born of course the monarchs were long gone. Mi bisabuela would not live much longer either; she wouldn’t live to see me going into orbit for the first time, shuttle shaking in the heat of reentry and breaking apart above the ocean like butterfly wings in a storm.
The day mi bisabuela died was the day they launched the first of the solar orbiters out of Houston. We all had so much hope married to the little shuttle, were so afraid to watch it go for fear that it might stall and sputter and drop into the gulf of Mexico in a smoky ruin, taking with it all our optimism and big ideas about the future. But it did just fine: yellow fire and a gravity turn as it escaped the atmosphere, soon no more than a dim speck drifting off toward Venus. I remember sitting by her death bed, a meter tall, watching the streak of light fading in the sky until she blinked out in the night, her warm hand going soft in mine. For the next few evenings, we watched live news reports on the television at La Luchita, famished for updates of the orbiter’s progress; they had named it Daedalus, but everyone at home just called it ‘Arturito.’ After an hour, the old man would have to turn the generator off, and we would all walk back to our homes under the yellow moonlight — my father carrying me on one shoulder and the big machete on the other.
117 days took the shuttle to Venus, where it dropped a probe and the solar cell cluster into orbit and then disintegrated in the heat. For a few years, we celebrated the day the shuttle reached the planet as a national holiday, going out into the streets and lighting big balls of newspaper on fire and dancing to the old songs. But when the solar cells eventually burned out, it started feeling funny to celebrate, and the crew families had never liked it anyway, so the municipalities gave it up — though some years you could still look out into the streets at night and see the fires burning. I guess some people hold onto those traditions longer than others.
But in all accounts, that was the start of it, and afterward fresh solar cells went out to Venus in un-manned capsules, remote-navigated from Xbox joysticks by pilots younger than my little brother. We were all so sure that our hope lay there: in the black canvas between the stars, buried in the minerals of other worlds, or hidden in the secret fire at the heart of our solar system. So many envoys went out into the dark, never to return, and it took a long time for that hope to finally be broken — for the roots to begin reaching in the dark earth again, the land on which we had arisen. We have found no crystal balls in all our excavations, and the wizards that came to power in the dark years even could not foretell our final doom; but today there is a salty wind coming off the ocean, and the sun is rising in a silver sky, and as the rocket prepares to launch out of Houston one last time, the little lights are burning brightly on the altars and the ringing countdowns are just beginning.
—
Mi bisabuela told me that the monarchs had used to tell her secrets. On her fifth birthday, she discovered the hidden paths that climbed into the sky islands, up into the mountains where the orange butterflies appeared each winter like a faithful magic. Alone in the warm forests at the top of the mountain — the closest to the sun that she would ever be — she learned their language and listened to their stories, fables passed down generation to generation as the migrants made their long journey fleeing the northern storms. If you can believe the stories of mi bisabuela, the butterflies told her the whole future: prophecies related like lullabies, peeling back the skin of a fruit.
Mi bisabuela told us what she could still remember — my brothers and my cousins and me — in those early nights when the power would go out and we would gather around the fire, our mothers working on the generators and our fathers standing guard on porches, machetes gleaming silver in the moonlight. By then, of course, her mind was old, and her memories of the future were clouded in a fog — looking back to look forward, it was easy to be lost. Sometimes she would tell us what she thought was coming and it had already happened: a baby sister dying in the womb, a government being overthrown. Other times the prophecies she remembered never happened, and she grew embarrassed of her old friends that had told her secrets on the mountain. But remembering her, for me, is easy, because everything reminds me of her.
She rarely spoke about her parents or her abuelos, even to her children, so we don’t know for sure where her family came from; they may have sprung out of the ground like mushrooms, looking for the light. On the nights when the generators burned out and we gathered around the little fire, when she had come to the end of all her memories of the future, mi bisabuela would unwrap her memories of the past. She told her story like a magician, revealing a little at a time. Sometimes the magic would go wrong, and we would see the blood spatter on the wall, made dark and black by the dying fire. The history books were burned for warmth in the dark years; her magic shows were the only record that we ever found.
When mi bisabuela left her family’s home at the foot of Cerro Pelón, the monarchs had been gone ten years already, but she scrambled up one last time to the oyamel forests to look for her old friends. Maybe she had gone to say goodbye, or maybe she was desperate for a final prophecy, guessing at the peril that lay before them. But in their graveyard, she feared their angry spirits, grown lonely and bitter in their extinction, so she did not stay in the dark forests very long. From the mountain top, she could have seen Mexico City burning, black smoke rising like an accusing finger pointed at God.
Her parents sent her north and then east with the other families heading for the border, saying good luck, we will miss you, we love you, and then vanishing from history. On their long migration they would have carried radios to listen to the coastal cities fall into the rising ocean, bulletins in Spanish and English reporting on the trials of the oil barons in the kangaroo courts, and the scapegoats exiled out into the waste lands, eventually only static crackling near flooded streams. Following those streams to their headwaters, they took refuge in the sky islands, where the great antennas on the mountain tops shaved clean became watch-towers. When the hurricanes approached, they abandoned those elevations and descended again into the forests of the past. Some forgot their destinations and remained in those places like wandering ghosts, their companions ultimately deserting them. In the hot jungles old mothers soothed babies mourning a world they had never known. In some small towns in the valleys, news didn’t reach the people for years that the world had ended; their rituals were preserved like fossils, and as the shadow of extinction fell over them more slowly the eschatologists raced to record their funeral traditions in the thick books of annihilation.
When they reached Palmillas, they heard the first rumors of the doom cults out of western Tejas, collectives who had made their churches in the old coal plants and oil fields, worshipping our extinction. These reports proved so alluring to a great-aunt in their party that she vanished one night in early May to make tracks for Odessa. From the rivers running into the Gulf, they could see the distant silhouettes of their temples in the sea, built around the pale bones of the last great whales.
By that time, the borders had evaporated like water from the dry reservoirs of the west, and migrants were moving in and out of the old states and across the border into Tejas like their ancestors had centuries ago, no more checkpoints, no more cages. Fortress America with its great barricades had crumbled, and it didn’t have any dreams left to offer.
They dug in to wait out the storm a while outside Rayones, where my mother’s family had settled. From their refugio, they heard news from the north of private trials and public executions, the last of the climate criminals pulled out from their bunkers. Alone in the dark, they prayed in the ruin of a collapsing world. Before she died, my mother showed me photographs of the plunderers and death patrols that swept through her little town from the city, them looking like creeping spirits set loose from a dropped and broken pot containing death. She called me Mija and said I was her favorite daughter because my heart had not stopped inside her like the hearts of mis hermanas and I had lived to see the golden sun rising over the mountains. My mother told me also about the cave bats of Rayones that her grandparents had used to know so well, hidden in the dark wells underneath the mountains, and how they had once erupted from their secret roosts at sunset to dance against the colors in the night — but they were long gone by the advent of my mother’s generation.
If the monarchs had survived, they might have passed la gente de mi bisabuela on their long migrations, the people moving north as the butterflies went south. But after they vanished from the oyamel forests above Pelón, mi bisabuela never saw or heard from them again. Either they had frozen in the hard winters of the north or they’d abandoned their old mountains for new lands far beyond us. Because mi bisabuela never knew for sure, she made up stories for them; she told us that the butterflies had all turned into beautiful women who had danced away, or that they had flown off into outer space to live on Jupiter, their light wings growing into sails to catch the sweet-tasting solar winds.
It would have been a sad thing to watch, I think, for the people who were there to see it. Some of the animals disappeared slowly over generations, changing as they did; mis abuelos watched the cave salamanders go blind and lose their legs again and descend once more beneath the earth. The frogs collected in their burrows to pray for rain, sending sentries out to bring back news of the world above as the ones below grew desperate; but eventually their scouts went silent (we wonder how they mourned for the eggs they left above them in the pools that they abandoned).
And some, they say, vanished overnight — whole species blinking out, like they had called a meeting in the dead of night and then flown off into the dark, toward twinkling lights of distant stars, never to return. The astronomers mapped new constellations, and people said that it was the lightning bugs that had flown off all those years ago, finally shining once again. The last season of the lemon trees was beautiful, their bright exuberance before death.
When it was clear that nothing would survive much longer, the geneticists of the state scraped together the somatic cells and last eggs of whatever animals they could catch, and they sent up a little shuttle out beyond the thermosphere, a last satellite that they might call back home one day when the floodwaters had receded. But after decades, in the confusion of the climate wars, it was lost — lonely lights of hereditary echoes blinking in the endless dark. We made up stories about that too, to comfort one another; when my little brother cried about our mother dying, I told him there were penguins sliding on their bellies along the rings of Saturn.
—
The year the first solar orbiters went up, our family moved to Quijano near the Gulf, not far south of the old border on the Tejas state. From the bedroom window, or from the tin roof of the little house at night, we could see the lights across the water, sometimes blinking on the shore or moving out across the bay, and some nights shooting off straight up into the black sky, arcing, shimmering, exploding as the boosters fell away, then drifting, disappearing, gone. For a long time after mi bisabuela died, I watched the rockets by myself. There weren’t many insects left in those years but the ones that were sang their hearts out every night, their choir missing some of its important members, so imperfect but still beautiful. As the light faded, the sun moving on to light the dark side of the earth, I squinted in the dark to see the vapor trails and felt the most alone that I had ever been. Then later my father offered to share the ritual. Those nights, watching for the orbiters to launch, we talked about what it must be like to look down on everything we knew from far above, to see the world like God must see it, if God was up there still, if God had not abandoned us for higher ground. We talked about going up there to find out, or to find my mother. I was sure then that if there was any answer, it was out there, and not here where all the cathedrals had gone empty. We never talked about my mother anymore, because her ghost had visited the old house from time to time before we moved up to Quijano, and we all felt guilty I think for leaving her behind. We had not been back there, any of us, to the old oak forests where her spirit wandered. My father said it was too dangerous to go back, but I think that also it was too sad.
I was sure that if she could have, mi bisabuela would have gone to outer space. What did she owe the earth, which had taken everything she loved, and then taken her as well? She who had lived to see the monarchs abandon their last refuge, the torches of existence blinking out one by one.
When I finally made it, it was different than I imagined it would be. The first time that I went up there into orbit, the new tech was still young and unreliable, and nobody was certain that the heavy engines wouldn’t ignite the rocket like a candle against the blue line of the sea; but our launch took us on a smooth climb through the straits and we passed the old broken satellites and atmosphere-stations, and I thought about the Daedalus and what those old astronauts must have felt as the golden light grew brighter and warmer in the dark. We were headed for the Mars Landing to revive the orbiter shuttles that had returned, burned and battered, from the solar circle.
In the old textbooks at the college, there were diagrams and blueprints of the solar orbiters, their circuitboards like naked bodies cut open, dissected; in the footnotes and appendixes, the writers had hidden the histories, and the censors never found them. Did you know that there were rolling blackouts over North America while the tech was tested here in orbit over earth, and that Asia and eastern Russia were in the dark for years, even in the cold and black of winter? The ministries never released the death toll, and we can only guess at what the people felt on those nights when the temperature dropped and the sun never came up above the forests. What they do know is that the Eurasian wolves returned in great numbers in those years. When the coastal cities were reclaimed, the archeologists uncovered older knowledge and the engineers built new fortresses, and the fury of the sea crashed against tall concrete like monuments for our survival instinct. The great old cities were excavated and Houston was pulled out of the deep; our civilization was reconstructed on stilts, putting us a little closer to the far white stars that had soothed our ancestors on the dark and deadly nights of our creation. In the dark times, the sky was worshipped as salvation, but it was a ghost in a sheet — always cunning, always deadly.
The Daedalus went up out of Houston, us watching it across the Gulf, and years later when I was grown I went up out of Houston too. The water, from above, looked like a mirror where past and future met, scuffled, were distorted, passed away. I couldn’t see my family’s home from the little window when we launched, but I knew that my father was sitting on the tin roof of the house in old Quijano, thinking of my mother.
Pushing through the thermosphere felt like being born again, the shuttle pushing up through a magnetic womb to emerge in cold space dark and pitiless, like a fragile seed in a great hand. The pilot held the shuttle steady as we rattled in the last grip of the earth’s embrace, then broke free and spiraled, turning, out into the wastes. The route to the red earth was one of the straight ways, but the ship’s computer was worthless for the navigation; the pilot would have to do it all herself, staying awake through the long nights to watch for the landmarks and the way-stations that were hiding in the dark. The rest of us chemical-slept, and when we awoke in orbit around the red world the pilot's eyes were bloodshot and she was thinner, and we did the calculations to begin our spiral to the planet.
We landed out beyond the iron city, and it was a long walk in with the two engineers pulling the heavy cart and all of us hauling oxygen tanks on our shoulders. When we finally stood before the gates, they scanned our temperatures and took us down the elevator, deep into the safe zone and the battery maze.
I remember walking the long halls in the bunkers under red rock, looking out at an orange sky through portholes in the steel and wondering what the warm scree would feel like underneath bare feet. Whatever it felt like, I knew it wouldn’t feel like home. Those first nights sleeping far away from Earth, I dreamed about the mountain that was mi bisabuela’s myth, last known outpost of a heritage that was vanishing a day at a time. It occurred to me that I had never told anyone her story, never passed it down; if I died in cold space in a broken shuttle, all her secrets died with me. In the pre-dawn hours before the day-shifts started, I sojourned past the pit-mine scars to the altitude-limit, imagining that the butterflies of mi bisabuela might have settled on the red world on their last forlorn migration.
For the eighteen months that we were out there, we repaired the orbiters that had gone down in the storm-deserts — navigation brains cooked from the exposure — and sent them back out one by one into the distant light, taping photos of our families to their loveless faces. We received news from home sporadically; a fascist had been deposed in Amazonia; the pandemic in Europe was dying down; my little brother’s wife had had the baby. We felt like we existed out of time, so far away from the roots that had grown us. Every one of the orbiters that came back damaged, we fixed and sent back out to drink more light from the distant sun, new solar panels gleaming in the dark.
In the last few weeks of that first deployment, I began to pray again — I hadn’t done that since my mother died. I sent my wishes out like messages in bottles: Let me make it home - let me see my family again - Madre de Diós, don’t let me die in outer space. I wondered what I would dream about in chemical-sleep: mi familia, la tierra, el más allá — las oraciones de mi corazón.
On the way back home was when the shuttle exploded, the poor pilot not seeing the meteor field until the first rocks had peppered the thick glass like a hundred little missiles. Even when the crew hull splintered the alarms never went off, and we watched the shuttle fracture like a broken arm in the dead silence of neutral space, the cold black sea not caring if we lived or died. I was blinded from the explosions in the airlock and thrown out into the vacuum like a dead stick, thinking I’m so sorry before blacking out from the transient acceleration and drifting off into the wastes.
—
In near-earth orbit, in the shrapnel of the meteor stream and broken pieces of the shuttle, a great black shape comes in from outer darkness, black wings the size of solar sails blotting out the light. At first I believe that I am still dreaming the adrenaline-visions of my apocalypse, but I can see my breath fog the scarred glass of my helmet, I can feel the cold fingers of space finding the thin spots in my flight suit, I can hear the silence of eternity. I am floating among the orbiting boulders of ore and iridium, and the earth below me has dropped away, sunken as if beneath a concealing wave. I ask myself: have I become a ghost?
The great bat flies in and perches on a piece of rock in orbit, little satellite. The bulk of the lost animal blots out the sun, and then I am in its shadow; night descending. It folds its heavy wings and I see myself reflected in black eyes, floating there in empty space, the great expanse. It studies me for a long time — trying to solve a strange equation using mathematics from a distant past. Then the bat speaks, saying:
— You are lost.
I say nothing. How can I? The bat says:
— You come from where my fathers came: from the land of caves and singing water.
I say: “The Earth.” And the bat says:
— We flew out of those caves long ago. The caves had all collapsed on us, you see, and we were trapped. But some of us escaped; the earth was changing, and we had to leave.
I want to ask him where they had gone; how they had escaped; how he has come to find me in the poor wreck of our beloved shuttle. But the bat continues without pausing — taking a great breath, tasting oxygen on his tongue.
— We flew straight into the sky and we did not stop. Soon the blue sky became black and our wings carried us further up and further out, and the air grew thin and we could fly farther, and we felt that we were free of our heavy bodies. And because we had grown ourselves great wings, they carried us for longer than we had intended.
And the bat spreads out his wings, and I see that they are far-reaching, wide and long and spanning the heavens, and though they are grand they sink sadly under a weight, as if they are very tired. And the bat leans in and asks me:
— Have you seen my sons?
He offers the question as if he has just remembered, as if it is of great importance.
— I have lost them, you see, for this place is wide and deep and we make our homes wherever we can find our footing. Our roosts are hidden in far places, deep caverns, and it is difficult to find one another now. Our songs do not lead us anywhere out here, the way they did on earth.
And it makes me very sad, sadder than I can remember ever being my whole life, but I can only say that I have never seen them, unless he means the flying satellites that I have seen at night, passing over the moon in shadows like the tilting birds and bats and giant moths de la historians de mi bisabuela. She had used to tell me that before the animals disappeared, they had changed, and some had grown bigger and some smaller, and I wonder if she had ever imagined a creature like the great bat king who has pulled me from the wreckage of the dying shuttle.
Hearing that I have seen no sign of signal of his kin, the old bat says:
— Then I shall carry you along in my wings, back to the earth. And if you meet my sons, you will tell them that I am searching for them, won’t you?
I promise that I will, although I do not believe then and I will not believe later that they still live on the earth, if they ever had. I wish that I had heard something that might soothe the old great bat in the loneliness of space, be he a ghost or a memory or a true titan evolved beyond his nature, the last of the flying mammals of the earth. But I can offer him nothing, nothing more than an answer and a promise as he folds me in his great wings and wraps me in a darkness, and I watch the great canvas of the endless eternity disappear as I feel warm water, deep and pure, pour down into the frigid rivers of my heart.
—
When I woke up in the hospital outside of Mexico City, I watched repeating footage of the crash on the television by the window, exploding pieces of the orbiter flying off into blue sky like broken cortical bones and liquid oxygen incinerating in the atmosphere in a cloud. There were crowds in the streets below the hospital, and people sitting out on the roofs of flooded sky-scrapers to watch what was left of the breakup streaking down to earth in plumes. My father was beside me at the hospital, his big hand holding mine, and I could still feel the places it was calloused from the old machete.
He had made a little altar for me on the bedside table, and by the time that I awoke the candles had burned down to almost nothing. The last breaths of their death-light illuminated photos of our family, precious tokens carried out from jungles of the past. He had opened the window also, and in washed the salty air from off the Gulf like a sweet prayer answered.
When I had laid in the bed for three days, I asked him if he had ever seen the cave bats that had once lived beneath the stone mountains of my mother’s town, but he said that he had never seen them — that they had died out years before he had been born, and that mi bisabuela would have been the one to ask, though she was long gone now many years herself. Later, I would ask the eschatologists, and they would tell me that there were no records of when the great bats had left the earth, no indications of old wisdom lingering in the empty places between the star-fields among the wastes. But even they could not explain how I was laid so gently in the shallow waters of the gulf, while the shuttle disintegrated in the atmosphere above the city and the poor pilot went drifting out into eternity with the engineers, their names left only to be etched beneath the others on the black marble monolith of the memorials and ofrendas.
In my dreams those nights I stayed with my father in the hospital, I watched the great bat emerge again from enchanted black to sit before me in the void, but it was not long before I began to forget its face, and its words were lost among the fog of memory.
After my recovery, I was cleared to go up again, and we spent a few years exploring Io, mapping the volcanoes and getting the foundations of the geothermal plant set up to send the energy back home. We sunk deep wells into the exo-planets, drinking the good riches like ambrosia for the healing of our wounds. I watched as more and more rockets launched from the long dikes by the water, then fewer, then none at all for many years.
For these years I have stayed here beside the ocean, and when my father died I buried him beneath the dunes, knowing that the earth would pull him deep over the ages, and hoping that he might finally go to find my mother in the dark forests that she haunted. I know that one day the ocean will erode his memorial, and what is left of him will drift in those dark waters, as I have drifted too.
And the ocean, I look on as a prisoner long-forgotten in the depths of an ancient prison, trusting it little and hoping only that it will go on sleeping beyond the tall walls of our new cities. In the night, the ocean reflects the wavering stars, and it seems that there are two gulfs, two priestesses, both offering relief and resurrection and a final judgement for all our ancient sins. The gulf of space, murderess, awaits me.
I am going back out there in a few weeks, you see — back into the dark. But not to dig for oil in the wells of Titan or to mine the seams of lithium in Europa’s ice. The news has just come in that they have finally found the little satellite, orbiting our faithful moon for the last one hundred and eleven years — the orbiter that holds the embryos in a cradle of liquid-nitrogen and protectant, the heritage of one hundred thousand species that blinked out when the night was at its darkest, and might finally be re-kindled in the warm tinder of the earth. It is an ark of hope among apocalyptic waters.
I know it isn’t going to be the same as it was (they say the ghosts of the mountain gorillas still haunt the Impenetrable jungles and the volcanoes of the Congo) — that the great herds that spread out across the plains will be barren of those long hereditary memories that their ancestors bore and buried in the dirt; that the wide flocks that might bring new color to the sky will house an aching emptiness inside of them forever, because the generations that had brought them out of dark places long ago have been de-throned. But we have begun re-constructing the great moat-marshes and fortress forests of the earth, and the places we’ve prepared for them might finally hear the sounds of chirping lullabies from the first chorus frogs, finally feel the bellies of old snakes slinking through the dewy fields.
At the end of each October in the city, they make altars for the animals that disappeared and are never coming back, photographs and drawings nestled among the marigolds and salt to tie their memories to the earth; these are the lights that we will watch as we rise above the ocean and spiral out in yellow fire and a gravity turn to rescue the descendants of a long and woeful genocide.
But the shuttles now are very old and have not been launched for decades, and the last emissary seven years ago burned up in re-entry like newspaper in the street of a Mexican village. They are taking bets in some parts of the city, and my people have money in both corners; the shuttle might go up and never come back down, and we might be spit out into the dark to drift forever like a wounded bat in the wet night.
When I close my eyes I am still drifting, and the little yellow ball is growing smaller and smaller as the planets pass like decades. The soft night surf of the ocean — pulled in an unconditional romance by the moon — becomes the low of an engine and the endless silence of space, two salsa dancers moving on into eternity, witnessed by an entire species.
—
It is the early morning before the launch, and I have walked out to watch the sun rising over the high tide, blue water lapping at the ankles of the house, and as the gray grass whistles I watch an orange butterfly fight the sea wind to gain the beach. It lands on a tuft of yellow wheat; its wings are tattered and its body old. I speak to it for just a moment before the wind carries it away, inland, toward the mountains; I have no time to ask for prophecies, nor to ask if it still holds the memory (passed down; one generation at a time) of a little girl who once climbed into the oyamel forests of its ancestors, looking for the sun.
I have made my peace with it: if I die in space like a sailor in blue water, my last vision will be of the little marble spinning in the dark. It is the home that we have always known, and that we will never abandon; we are the butterflies returning to our mountain.
Tomorrow is the Day of the Living, and we will all be celebrating.