Chapter 8 Summary: Orbit 5, Ascending

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

The chapter opens with Anton, a cosmonaut aboard the International Space Station, recalling two dreams he had a fortnight earlier about the imminent moon landing. The dreams were inspired by the astronauts who had just left Cape Canaveral. In the first dream, Anton finds himself drifting alone in space, as if he were Michael Collins looking at the famous 1969 photograph of the lunar module leaving the moon's surface, with the Earth hanging beyond. In the second dream, he hears a murmur of voices that becomes his own, and he sees himself on Earth shouting up at his wife, who is behind a camera lens on the distant moon. Anton reflects on his father's fables about Russian moon landings—stories of a Russian flag and a box of Korovka sweets left for him—which he later realized were false. He remembers telling his wife with certainty that he would be the first Russian to go to the moon.

At lunch, Shaun tells Nell about watching a recording of the first moon landing with his father and uncle when he was ten or eleven. He disliked it because he saw a hungry, lacking look on his father's face, which put him off the idea of being an astronaut. Nell responds by recalling her childhood experience of watching the Challenger launch, which made space flight real to her. She became obsessed with the astronauts who died, lighting candles on their birthdays for years. She reflects on her father's comment that candles keep demons away, and how that did not comfort her given the violent deaths of the crew.

Meanwhile, Chie tends to the experiment mice aboard the station. She observes that the untreated mice are wasting away, while those injected with a decoy receptor are sturdier, and the genetically modified mice are bolder. She whispers to them that none will survive, and she reflects on missing her mother's bone-picking ceremony, a Japanese ritual where family members comb ashes for bone fragments. She thinks of the ulna bone in her mother's wrist and hopes her uncle will look for it.

Pietro eats macaroni cheese and recalls a failed experiment with garlic that left the station smelling for weeks. He thinks about his teenage daughter's question: