You have been lied to. Not by me, not even directly, really, by anyone specific.
But I want you to ask yourself, where is the Earth? Where is space? You say to your self, the Earth is floating in space, and space is all around us. Space, we imagine, is a big black canvas, and stars and planets are little dots painted on its surface. This is a very neat and tidy way to picture the universe around us, but it is not a useful model, and from a practical sense it is very wrong.
To begin with, space is not. It isn't anything, anywhere. It is no thing, and no where. Air and other matter likes to stick to itself, so the regions in between the concentrations are a profound absence of material. Sub-atomically speaking, space is a writhing mass of average nothingness, where particles pop in and out of existence constantly, but happen to mostly cancel themselves out into a vacuum.
If you were floating in space, you wouldn't be floating at all. No matter where you go, you would be falling towards something, very slowly. Gravity has no drop off, it just gets weaker. But if you seemed to be floating in space, looking out at the Earth, you might say that the Earth is also (not) floating in space, that space is all around it. And from that perspective you may be correct.
But we are not floating in space, we are down here on Earth. You are on Earth. If you are a human being, you are on Earth, with a few exceptions who are very high up in the air falling around the Earth. I would go so far to say that if you are not on Earth, you are not a human. You may question me here, but you'll understand soon enough.
Up and down are relative. This one should not be a controversial statement, I think. You already know this. It's like left and right; nobody older than two needs to be told that my left isn't your left if you're facing me.
And yet, most of us still have to stop and think about it, for a fraction of a second maybe, every single time we need to tell someone they have something on their face.
So up and down are like this. My father used to tell me "Ezra, get off the ceiling."
"But I'm not on the ceiling" I would say, perfunctorily, as if I hadn't heard the joke five million times.
"That's not what that fly told me!" he would say, pointing somewhere up on the wall where there may have been (but likely wasn't) a fly. He did this for my mother, I guess, who loved each of his five or so jokes, told nearly daily. She always laughed.
Love is like this-- nonsensical. Our most aggravating traits are transmuted into "charm" and "quirk" like a personal rebranding campaign. This is a subset of a larger pattern of affectionate self-delusion.
I have a phobia of heights. Or, if you prefer, I am particularly well grounded. Neither ways of phrasing make it a great trait for a pilot to have. But here we are.
The reality is that flying has never frightened me. I became particularly well grounded when I was twelve, and I fell out of a tree. I managed not to break any bones, but gravity and I never got along very well after that. Which I think is exactly what makes flight so wonderful.
When you're out on a balcony, ten stories up, you have no control over gravity, no control over whether or not, or how fast you will fall, should the railing you lean on decide you aren't as grounded as you should be. But in the cockpit, you have all the control. You can pass out when you're flying a plane, and you don't drop out of the sky. Planes today will fly themselves home if they decide you aren't up to the job.
Everything, of course, is effected by gravity. But this is another one of those things, like left and right, that we have to think about to know it's true. When you fire a bullet, the bullet travels in an arc, as any projectile would. And when you're a true marksman-- particularly a sniper-- you have to learn to intuit this. The bullet is going to hit somewhere below where you aim the barrel.
So there is something about traveling very fast that makes the gentle pull of the earth feel less relevant. When you're a mile up, pulling hundreds of knots, you have taken complete control of acceleration, pointing it whichever way you like.
***
My father was a pilot, but not in the same sense as I. He flew passenger jets. Very elite, very bougie. No one unimportant flies anymore of course, so there's an air of sophistication about the job, (another of his jokes). My mother would say he was a pilot so he could fuck flight attendants, and this was probably true. I don't know what flying meant to him really. I know now that he never really piloted much of anything. For passenger jets, the pilot is the king of his aircraft; which is to say, he is an overpaid figurehead with no power. A computer controls take-off, cruising, and landing. Planes take-off all the time, I am told, without their pilots, who got themselves drunk in the airport and missed the flight.
Naturally, he never described his job this way, when I was young, and I idolized the image of him as a dashing master of the air. By the time I became a pilot, he was several years dead, but I doubt he would have cared much anyway. By then, the goal was mine alone.
***
So up and down are relative. Like I said, we know this. We know that up for you and I is the opposite of up for someone opposite us, on the other side of the planet. When you're flying, you almost can get a sense of the curvature of the earth, if you get up high enough, and go fast enough, it almost feels like you're moving about a globe, but in every other way, our monkey brains cannot conceive a true horizon, and imagine the world is flat. Everything in the sky, then is up, be it clouds or the moon and stars. I imagined, when I was young and naïve, that the relativity of up and down would hold true up in the air, out of the air, far from our home in outer space.
When we picture space, space travel, we do so with analogies. Our first great voyages were over the ocean, and we inherit our terminologies from this tradition. So too, we picture space ships, navigating space laterally, hopping from one round little planet island to another, as if there were a solar sea that all the world bob on the surface of. Our models of the system show each planet in a neat little row, radiating out from the sun. I think this is the only way we have to make sense of it. But like, think about it.
Just picture it in your head. From the perspective of someone here on earth, a space shuttle takes off, and it travels up. into the sky. And it keeps going up. Our ship is sailing to mars. We look up, and there is mars up there. you can point to it, above your head. Or the moon. We land on the moon, and the lander is hanging off of its face, dangling over your head, back down on the earth. The moon has just scarcely enough influence to convince you that being grounded means staying put on its surface, just try not to jump too high. It isn't terribly convincing, after all.
With a hard enough hit, you can put a baseball into orbit, from the moon's surface. It's true.
***
The moon is very interesting, but lets talk about Mars. None of us call it Mars, of course. If you've been to Mars, you probably call it Hell, or something more vulgar. Hell is a concept we imagined to describe a place most conceivably anathema to mankind. Hell is de-humanizing by definition. It is human to adapt to any environment, to numb ourselves to pain, to alter our selves or our surroundings so that we may flourish wherever we go.
So for a place to be truly dehumanizing, to be an un-dullable pain, it must remove from us whatever makes us human. So to be in Hell is to cease to be human at all.
***
Uniquely, I may claim to have been married to a Martian. I say uniquely, because there is, and only ever has been, one native born Martian, and she only married once, and it was to me, however brief. The nature of Marguerite's birth is fairly well known, though it isn't a story we see fit to tell school children without some censoring. Margie was born during the last Mars mission run by the First Committee. It's often said that the circumstances of her birth are precisely what lead to the First Committee being dissolved, but this is a silly notion if you're familiar with the mars missions at all. The whole program had been a shit-show, and dear Margie was just a rotten cherry on the very moldy cake.
I met Marguerite in a bar in Giza. When I say "I met," what I mean is I was told that I met. Just like I was told that I married, and then later, was told that I divorced. That isn't to say that I remember none of my marriage. We spent a couple years together, it is merely the prologue and epilogue of our marriage that remains hazy to me. I couldn't begin to tell you what drew us to one another, each of us piss drunk and otherwise miserable. I know I am less than a joy to spend any length of time with when drunk, but perhaps that is precisely what we had in common.
Giza sprung up out of a war-torn Egypt as a re-born tourist trap in the late twenty-first century, modeled after Las Vegas, the American casino capital-turned-ghost-town, after it stopped making economic sense to pump millions of gallons of water into the middle of a desert. Just as the Luxor had loomed an aped-Egypt over the Las Vegas skyline, so too do the real pyramids loom pregnant with fossilized potential behind the Giza skyscrapers. Locals like to call the city Vegas, and they talk about how great Nex' Vegas will be, just as Giza is so much better than Las' Vegas ever was.
So, there were several hotels and bars around Giza called Nex Vegas, and the one where I met my ex-wife was one of them. This particular Nex had a retro-futuristic theme to it. Where else would the next Vegas be, but on Mars? Naturally, it was favored spot of ex-astronauts of a certain age.
The name Vega, as in the star, comes from an old Arabic word meaning "falling." So, in the confused manner in which Giza mashes up languages, the marketing for the city likes to say that "Vegas is for falling in love," and maybe this is true. I think Margie and I loved each other, in a way. The air-raided ruins, where the real native Gizans huddle out of sight, perhaps that is a "quirk," and I should see my liquor born marriage as "charming."
***
In as much as Mars is Hell, Marguerite was truly a hellion as I knew her. The older astronauts called her Dante, affectionately, for having been the only person to set foot on mars and then return home, until the Third Committee Missions anyway. The night her and I met was several nights after I first noticed her. She kept to her self at a specific seat she liked at the bar. It was circular and glass, painted to look like the rings of Saturn. An interesting detail I doubt many people notice: each of the twenty or so seats has a different moon of Saturn pasted on it. Its the big important ones featured, of course. Saturn has over one hundred named moons. Margie always liked to sit on Titan, the gauzy orange gem-stone, the most famous of Saturn's many subordinates. Most nights, I sat across the rings from her, as the moons nearest to Titan were typically filled by her own usual satellites.
One of these was frequently Maven, a good friend of mine. Him and I were both in the same training program-- we were both still in training, in fact, around this time. He would go on to become Marguerite's second husband. A much better fit for her, I think.
I have been told I am an abrasive asshole. Or, if you prefer, I am uncharacteristically honest. Margie is also very honest. You might think that would make us all the more compatible, but it seems that no matter how honest you are, you still may have a low tolerance for truth coming from others.
Maven wasn't an honest person at all. Which is to say, he was exceptionally charming, and very easy to get along with. The most cheerful person in any room he enters. He denies this, but I am certain he introduced Marguerite and I the night I am told that we met. He was always making her laugh, even then.
Margie was not an astronaut herself, except technically. She had a love for the earth all her life-- ironic, you might say, for someone not born on it, but perhaps she had an outside perspective on our planet that the rest of us take for granted. She liked to walk barefoot. She wore her hair in tight, practical braids. She often looked angry when she wasn't laughing, but this was merely the face she made when she was thinking, and she was always deep in thought.
Physically, as in personality, Maven was her opposite. He was tall, broad shouldered. His face was already creased in his youth with laugh-lines. When he graduated the training program, he shaved his head bald in celebration, but back then he had a big mop of sandy-colored hair. Margie was the sort to speak softly, no-matter how raucous her surroundings, forcing anyone who cared to listen to lean in close to her, so Maven could often be seen hunched over down close to listen, only to spring back up in posture to bellow his infectious laughter.
***
The mid twenty-first century used to be thought of as a renaissance in space travel. That was the era of Elon Musk, famous for putting the first human beings on Mars. They were, of course, also the first human beings to die on Mars. As is typical of history, the former tends to be talked about a lot more frequently than the latter. Musk's company fell over itself at the time, struggling to find a warm body to peg the disaster on. Ultimately, it was probably just really bad luck. A bit of heat shielding came loose when they entered the Martian atmosphere, and resulted in a catastrophic hull failure on take off.
Still, history found itself a scape goat. Though he was acquitted, Simon Quaite was deemed guilty in the court of public opinion. He was the lead engineer on the team that assembled the first Mars shuttle, and was the head designer of the software that ran stress testing simulations. He had probably never even handled one of the heat-shield panels personally. In the end, he did what any decent human being does when the world turns on them.
He shot himself.
