From "Weight" by Jeanette Winterson, a retelling of the myth of Atlas.
When the Russians blasted Laika into space in 1957, they knew she wasn't coming back. An automatic hypodermic would poison her after seven days. She would orbit in her sputnik until the universe stopped.
When they closed the lid on Laika she trembled and her mouth went dry. There was water in a tube and she had been taught to drink from it. There was food too, but she didn't want water and food, she wanted her master, and night, and quiet, and all this not to be.
She was patient. She would have gone to the ends of the earth for her master. Instead she went into space.
Atlas had retreated so far into his mind that he did not notice the strange pod buzzing round him. Then he saw a little face at the thick sealed window. For a moment his heart leapt. As the pod came round again, Atlas freed one of his hands from his monstrous burden and caught it. It lay there like a lamed insect on his palm, and there was something inside.
Atlas cracked open the sputnik and found Laika, strapped down, unable to move, partly bald with fear and covered in sweat and urine and her own faeces. With infinite care, Atlas freed the dog, and set it down on nothing and gave it water to drink.
The speck-sized dog in the star-stretched universe licked the giant's hand. At that moment the needle in the pod moved to inject its victim, but it was too late, Laika was free.
Atlas knocked the pod aside, the silly thing of tin and wires, and Laika crawled unsteadily up his arm until she found a place to sleep, in a hollow of his shoulder, under a wavelength of his hair.
Atlas had long ago ceased to feel the weight of the world he carried, but he felt the skin and bone of this little dog. Now he was carrying something he wanted to keep, and that changed everything.
When they closed the lid on Laika she trembled and her mouth went dry. There was water in a tube and she had been taught to drink from it. There was food too, but she didn't want water and food, she wanted her master, and night, and quiet, and all this not to be.
She was patient. She would have gone to the ends of the earth for her master. Instead she went into space.
Atlas had retreated so far into his mind that he did not notice the strange pod buzzing round him. Then he saw a little face at the thick sealed window. For a moment his heart leapt. As the pod came round again, Atlas freed one of his hands from his monstrous burden and caught it. It lay there like a lamed insect on his palm, and there was something inside.
Atlas cracked open the sputnik and found Laika, strapped down, unable to move, partly bald with fear and covered in sweat and urine and her own faeces. With infinite care, Atlas freed the dog, and set it down on nothing and gave it water to drink.
The speck-sized dog in the star-stretched universe licked the giant's hand. At that moment the needle in the pod moved to inject its victim, but it was too late, Laika was free.
Atlas knocked the pod aside, the silly thing of tin and wires, and Laika crawled unsteadily up his arm until she found a place to sleep, in a hollow of his shoulder, under a wavelength of his hair.
Atlas had long ago ceased to feel the weight of the world he carried, but he felt the skin and bone of this little dog. Now he was carrying something he wanted to keep, and that changed everything.