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The E-Magazine of the British Interplanetary Society Worlds Beyond

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The E-Magazine of the British Interplanetary Society Worlds Beyond The e-Magazine of the British Interplanetary Society Worlds Beyond n this issue, we are pleased to announce and also takes another look at Alex In the next edition, we will have another that Rachel Armstrong FBIS has written Storer’s art. poem from Grant Sorrell, and Richard will Ianother story for us and we have a new be looking into some of the harsh realities author, Grant Sorrell who writes “space” Terry Don discusses a new way forward; of spaceflight, again delving into both fact poetry from the USA. We don’t get many is NASA going to the Moon or Mars and and fiction to show us some surprising people who write poetry in the realms of will it be a joint venture? John Silvester thoughts in an area close to the heart of science and science fiction, but saying that, has written a review of a new collection the BIS. We will also have a review from perhaps I can remind you that there was of science fiction stories by scientists John of Ruth Wheeler’s second book in her a lot of poetry in the BIS science fiction themselves – they are, after all, the very trilogy. anthology Visionary, which is still for sale at people who should know what they’re the BIS website. talking about when tackling this subject. So we start of this edition with Rachel Armstrong’s story: Clinic of Cultured Hearts. Also in this issue, our regular contributor John has also written a review of a new and Richard Hayes has written a Radical upcoming Sci-Fi author Ruth Wheeler, who Terry Henley FBIS Vectors article about some of the has written a trilogy and the first book is All Editor Odyssey exoplanets we may see in fact and fiction, Aliens Like Burgers. Clinic of Cultured Hearts by Rachel Armstrong FBIS trung like a marionette, Helena down her left arm and a crushing feeling it had irreparably rotted her muscle and watched the twitching infusion of within her chest – like she’d been caught at another time it would have killed her Scardiac cells empty in pulses from a under a truck. She also thought her whole outright. clear bag. It distorted the apparatus around jaw would explode but that was nothing her like a lens and snaked into an arterial compared to the airlessness and terror she’d But here she was, alive - with nothing shunt somewhere beneath the sheets. experienced in those long moments. Nor did beating on the screen; they’d already she remember whether she’d passed out. digested out the perished old one and It had been chaos of course, but now Just the crushing, brutal, explosive, endless inserted a carbon bio scaffolding frame things were likely on the mend. Although pain from nowhere. around the existing collagen skeleton – an it was daunting that she’d never leave the inviting structural system into which the Moon Base Assisted Living Unit, with all its It was a shock, especially when she’d felt so cardiac stem cells would settle and knit her benefits of reduced gravity on her bones little during the last forty years or so, which a whole new organ. and heart, she could think of worse ways simply compounded the trauma of the than spending however many of her last whole incident. Although she’d exercised Of course, it had been completely different years here. Although frankly, she didn’t feel regularly and eaten sensibly, the detritus for Michael. His entire chest had been old, just a little tired but it was time to face of old age had unavoidably accumulated in cracked opened like a nut when he’d had his facts – despite many advances in longevity her circulation, silted up her arteries until cardiac transplant. How she wished she’d not science, people still got old eventually – but one day, the right coronary artery simply lost him when he was only eighty. The love only if they lived long enough. blocked. of her life. They’d met on a correspondence course when she was pushing fifty but At a hundred and twenty, her first heart There it was on the screen, with a bite taken they’d had such incredible times together. attack had been the most painful thing out of it, cupping her vacant heart’s shadow Frankly, they shared the same soul and she had ever experienced. A searing pain like it was examining finely cut glass. But all the differences and life’s complications Odyssey: The e-Magazine of the British Interplanetary Society: Issue 46 www.bis-space.com 1 simply worked themselves out. Quickly, she stopped herself from thinking about him and his world’s blue gaze. A technique that she’d learned to stop nostalgia and survive advancing age. Forgetting wasn’t the existential poison for immortality, it was all the remembering – regrets, losses, the things that might have been. Stop. An alarm was sounding. She looked over at the liquid tree of infusions that would follow this one, the current one being on its last few pulses. Sacs of turbid liquids, pauses associated with bad news.” so painful?” digital pulses, bleeps, and thin wires splayed over images from her insides –a theatre “I thought that was supposed to be, well Over the next month’s Helena discovered of anatomy which helped her establish a you know a fairytale.” that she was much less able to suppress new intimacy with her own insides, helping her feelings. Sometimes she’d wake and her medical crew review her outputs and “Naturally, we gave little thought to the hear Michael comforting her, or reading her focusing on staying alive without a heart. endocrine functions of the heart, since poetry. At one point, she’d woken from a Several nurses bounced their way from an we’d got very focused on its mechanics. night terror and saw him sitting on the end observation desk, brachiating as much as Besides, it’s simply easier to study pressure, of the bed. walking over to her cot under the influence flow and mechanical power and much of one-sixth earth’s gravity. They appeared harder to measure physical sensations and “Shh!” he put his finger to her lips. “It’s to be at the end of a break, as one of them the emotions that flow in response to the going to be okay.” was still sucking on the end of a drink. world.” Helena realized that she’d have to get used As she was weaned from the drugs that kept to that and she’d quite happily exchange Helena found it odd that a tear involuntarily her stem cells in order and pain at bay, she liquid diets for the prospect of no bedsores. formed in the corner of her eye. learned the art of interoception, where she In fact, it was rather pleasant being in a could monitor the beat of her own heart semi-upright position during recuperation; “So, you’re saying the heart has hormones?” without the need for external apparatus. she could see everything going on, rather With this new skill, she discovered than just the ceiling, which was the view she “Yes, that’s been known for decades. The heightened emotional abilities. No longer remembered from most hospital beds. heart is essential for our emotions and feeling the need to shut out the pain of the works through a whole range of different past, she began to recall her life, magical The staff changed the bags and checked the neuro peptides. We’ve even discovered times, and heartbreak, without the clinic’s various lines, while increasingly irritating that the main Vagus nerve that supplies portfolio of anesthesia – painkillers for the alarms sounded – like enforced ear worm. the heart was also critical in this perceptual body, the mind and soul. Over the next few months Helena began link. Previously we thought it was an to feel decidedly stronger, got used to the “autonomic” system, one that worked In this way, the oldest woman in the solar indignity of regular enemas and felt far less without us being aware of its effects.” system lived a full existence until the grand fatigued. It wasn’t just the lack of gravity; old age of two hundred and ten, when one she’d noticed other things too. Her sense of “Really?” day she told staff nurse Timothy that her smell was stronger, the food tasted better – heart had completed its business – of living and she was becoming more emotional. She “Oh sure, why do you think heart attacks are the world’s accidents. wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Kessler Syndrome Over the last decades, she’d noticed she didn’t have to practice forgetting quite so by Grant Sorrell hard, as she was losing her feelings. She asked Someday satellites and space debris of everything we’ve ever thrown Amanda, her regular staff nurse whether will crash into the finite sky other “clients” had noticed the emotional into each other like a cigarette out the window changes when they grew a new heart. at twenty thousand miles per hour, or a bottle in the ocean. twenty thousand miles above Continue their collisional cascade “Well, of course! While we’ve known for the ground in low earth orbit, until three hundred thousand floating centuries that the heart’s mechanical the beginning of a cosmic cause scraps properties are essential for life, pumping and effect as they divide become double, quadruple, and we’re cast oxygenated blood throughout the body – and fill the void beneath an impassable but what we didn’t know is that it’s also the with pieces of themselves, a growing cloud of their fragments.
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