When I woke up that last morning, I felt extraordinarily well, the fatigue gone, in peace with myself: I thought that three days in this lower gravity had some effect after all! I washed, dressed, went to the white lounge and had breakfast. Then, as I sat in the confortable leather sofa, telling myself that everything was all right, I could feel this strange intuition that something unusual was about to happen. That feeling quickly grew to certainty at the sight of Peter walking straight towards me, the firmness of his pace, the steadiness of his stare... He sat on the sofa in front of me, and started talking with his eyes plunged into mine...
I don’t know how he did it, but he somehow got me up to my feet and walked me to the elevator doorway. He kept giving me all sorts of apparently useless instructions to follow, such as «Look me in the eyes» or «Place your left foot over here» or «Pull this zipper up»... He talked about my family, the upcoming elections in EEU, how the 49’ers could have won the last Grey Cup, his father’s ’53 Pontiac... He would grab my arm, tap my shoulder, brush imaginary dust from my coat... I barely realized that the elevator has taken us up all the way to the core level... I was somehow hypnotized by Peter’s endless and cahotic speech, his weird behaviour...
In fact, I pretty well knew what Peter was doing: he couldn’t send me back to Earth without a visit to the Panorama. And he used this strange technique to get me up there despite my fear of weightlessness...! How it overcame my nausea is a mystery to me, but it worked! Talking nonstop, he was slowly guiding me towards the end of the core opposite to the dock, the one with the transparent wall (ceiling? floor?).
I had never thought it could be so overwhelmingly beautiful! I stayed for hours with my face stuck on the bay’s window, watching this awsome view of the earth... The weightlessness and the huge dimensions of this plexiglass bubble... I felt like being the only living thing in the entire universe, floating in a nothingness with the most spectacular vision of a magnificent blue planet...
The feeling is by far undiscribable... Someone snapped a picture of me, with tears floating around my cheeks, my jaw hanging loose; I never noticed he did! Peter and many others said they had been trying to talk to me, but I never heard a thing! The emotion is so utterly intense... I remember breathing every now and then, in long stoccados, wrestling to keep my heart from jumping out of my chest...
I can’t believe we’ve been so blind, so selfish, so narrow-minded... How could we have let wars happen in such a splendid and heavenly place? How can there be hatred, discrimination, intolerance... crime, jealousy, pain, poverty... These things happen in hell, not in a palace of beauty and peace such as this...
And as I was wiping the tears from my eyes, the landscapes kept passing on and on and on, sea after land after cloudy mists, sunset after sunrise, day after night, dawn after crepuscule... North after south after north... Icy plains of blindening whites, golden carpets of sandy deserts, velvet greens of rainforests and jungles, sparkling dark blue oceans... And the joyful games of the cottony mists of clouds, forever repeating, never the same...
After a couple of these artificial days, I realized a strange phenomenom: as we travel over the sunlit face of the earth, there is very little evidence of any form of civilization, except for a few hazy smogs over the largest cities... There is so much to be seen, anyway, of the mountains, shores, plains and seas... And on the other side, the «night» side, nothing of all this is clearly visible: while I could barely guess the contours of continents, the sparkling magic of the city lights filled all sight, mocking the surrounding stars, with their inextricable networks of roads and nodes...
It was an eternal come and go between nature and civilization: a hide-and-seek between the Almighty Creation and the evidence of an organized technology. Mutually excluded, taking over one another in an endless valse, racing over and over, again and again...
I have no recollection of coming back down to the torus level... The next thing I remember is sitting in the green lounge, sipping a glass of orange juice, with Peter’s enormous smile staring at me... He did’nt say a thing, and I’m grateful to him for that: wouldn’t words have spoiled the magic? Reading the understanding and the compassion in his eyes was all it took to communicate, because he knew too well the transformation that had taken place inside of me...
I feel a totally new person... Changed, re-born, my soul wiped out of layers of soilage accumulated over the years. In this instant, I know I will never see the world the same way again. It took me the sighting of my home planet from up in the skies to realize what we are really.
And to behave accordingly.
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