Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

by Temi Oh

  They took a picture with the junior and senior crew together – Dr Golinsky, Igor and their commander – then countless others with flight directors, operational managers and even their old teachers. Astrid began fidgeting as her mouth started to hurt from smiling. Emotions were running high by that point, everyone’s eyes were glittering and it was difficult to tell whether they were saying ‘good luck’ or ‘goodbye.’

  BY THE TIME THEY drove out to the shuttle they had been in their spacesuits so long they were all beginning to sweat. They were sitting opposite each other in the van, five facing five, but were mostly quiet. Only Harry, Igor and Commander Sheppard were comfortable enough to make cheerful banter. The others avoided each other’s eyes, each in their own private world of anticipation. The silence became more noticeable as they left mission control behind, along with the band and the cheering crowd and the screen that read T-minus 90 minutes, and made their way to the open stretch of land where the shuttle was chained to the Earth.

  The Congreve was far bigger than Astrid remembered, the size of a cathedral. The orbiter, the small space where the crew would be strapped in, sat on top of propellant-filled towers which generated enough thrust to hurl them through the atmosphere. Astrid climbed out of the van at the foot of the giant, that hissed and thrummed, and from where she stood, could see steam curl off the steel surface like breath through parted lips.

  Sixty metres above her the orbiter access was like the arm of a crane, and as they took the lift up to it Astrid felt the drop in her stomach. Yet she knew this thirty seconds of acceleration was nothing compared to the flight that awaited her on the other side of the shuttle’s hatch, where they would soar to twenty-six times the speed of sound in eight minutes.

  The elevator door slid open to a sunlit bridge and they were greeted by the close-out crew – the white-suited technicians who approached the senior astronauts with hugs and the members of the Beta with handshakes. ‘Just follow the yellow-brick road,’ said one of the men with a number 2 printed on his back. He was pointing to the yellow and black chevrons painted on the narrow walkway that led to the white room, the small chamber in front of the hatch. The little space was packed with people and almost as soon as Astrid entered three of them descended on her, tugging at the straps on her spacesuit and re-attaching communication lines.

  ‘Hey. Jesse looked up from the small crowd in front of him and asked, ‘You don’t know how to . . .’ He was fiddling with the straps on his parachute, blushing with confusion. Astrid was about to lean over to help him when one of the suit technicians brushed her hands away and attached it herself. ‘You’re ready,’ she told him, and Jesse took a deep breath and headed into the shuttle. ‘See you on the other side,’ he said over his shoulder.

  ‘How does that feel?’ A man peered up at Astrid from behind his glasses, fastening the final strap on her suit. ‘Too tight?’

  ‘Not really,’ she told him, and then it was her turn to step through the hatch. It was a little circular door and climbing in was an inelegant process that required Astrid to get on all fours and then to roll onto her back, every movement a struggle in her heavy suit. She felt like a diver wearing a second skeleton, but it occurred to her, as the crew fumbled to strap her in, that these were the last people she would see on Earth, and she didn’t even know their names.

  Once they finished, Astrid was tied down so tightly she could feel the pulse throbbing in her legs. Her ears were filled with the chatter of mission control. ‘As you know: I’ve done this a few times,’ Commander Sheppard said with a smile. ‘It’s over quickly. Your job is just to take it all in.’

  Something strange and wonderful occurred to Astrid then. The fight was finished. For the first time in her life, even if she did nothing at all, she would be in space.

  SOMETIMES HER FATHER WOULD call upon new believers to tell the story of how they came to faith. Their testimony. And this was hers. Astrid had grown up knowing that there was a distant planet outside her own solar system, a green twin of Earth orbiting dual stars. The first day that a longing to go there awoke inside her, she had been in assembly. All the children in her year group had been ushered into the school hall to watch a video, part of a presentation delivered by a team from the UKSA. ‘Another habitable planet,’ announced one of them across the darkened room and the screen lit up with dazzling vistas of an alien land. Astrid saw an ocean, lush mountain ranges and terracotta canyons ridged like jewel-box shells.

  ‘They call it a “New Earth”,’ said the young astrobiologist with exaggerated air-quotes, ‘but our findings actually suggest that Terra-Two is many millions of years older than our own Earth; truly, we’re living on Terra-Two.’

  Under the collar of her shirt, Astrid’s neck prickled with goosebumps. She sat up as if she had been called by name, and in a way she had. This, they’d told her, was a place for the intrepid. The first settlers would not arrive until they were middle-aged, even if they left today. Their job would be to chart terrain, and to explore the land, to name the secret schools of fish that swept through the coral reefs, and photograph night-blooming flowers. Someone in this room, they’d said in a reverent whisper, may be the first to set foot in the crystalline caves that had formed underground. Astrid had imagined herself descending to find her own adult face reflected in the frosty mineral beams.

  This is a job for the brave, they’d said, a job for dreamers, for people who, like Astrid, woke every morning longing for another world. ‘Imagine it,’ the recruiter had said. And Astrid had.

  That week, she’d bounced around with the hyper energy of a new convert. She would get into Dalton, she would specialize in astrobiology, she would be accepted into the Beta and she would go to Terra-Two.

  Astrid would remember the years after that assembly and before the launch as a single shining line of triumph. The shortest route between point A, the naming of her desire and point B, leaving Earth – its sole zenith of realization.

  Later, they would ask what she had been thinking when the hatch slammed shut. Had she been contemplating what a slow labour their mission was, how many minds and hands it had taken to get her to this point, to this two-minute launch window? Or was she counting every sacrifice, every year of her life she had given and was still to give?

  As the flight director commenced the countdown, she heard Professor Stenton’s measured voice crackle through the headset. ‘Take care of yourself,’ she said, the thing she said whenever she bid them goodbye from the driveway before a school trip, or at the start of a holiday with the sun in her eyes.

  They would ask Astrid if she had been afraid and she would answer ‘no’ every time. And if she ever looked back at the strange arc of her life and wondered if any moment had been as perfect as dreaming of it, she would say, ‘that one’.

  The shuttle launched. Astrid burst through the luminescent atmosphere and into the black firmament beyond. She had been longing to leave her whole life, and finally nothing was standing between her and the stars.

  PART TWO

  JUNO

  13.05.12

  LAUNCH

  IT TAKES OVER A million pounds of fuel to launch a shuttle into space. A fact that occurred to Juno when the engines fired and the fear came. The shuttle pitched and rolled. Juno felt the back of her seat drop away from under her and she gasped.

  This was the dangerous point. Just before the solid rocket boosters lit, the computers could still call off the launch. It could be anything that forced them to abort: an overheated pump, a broken coolant valve or something more dangerous like a tank rupture. They had practised emergency escapes, jumping out of the hatch and running back across the access arm into the metal slide-wire baskets that would release them down the 400-metre drop to a shielded bunker to take cover from an explosion.

  As mission control counted down the final seconds, Juno was sure that something had gone wrong, because she felt as if the orbiter was about to roll right off the launch pad. Perhaps some bolt had ruptured too early and the shut
tle had ceded to gravity at this first hurdle.

  But, by the time the flight director said ‘One’, they were upright again and then they were flying.

  ‘Lift-off!’ came the exultant voice from mission control, the same way men shout, ‘Goooooooal!’ during a football match, ‘We have lift-off!’ and over the headset, Juno could hear laughter and applause.

  It was a brutal ride. The vibration rattled her bones and her muscles seized against the shockwaves. It felt as if the rocket was strapped right onto her back. As they shuddered up into the sky, she clenched her jaw to stop her teeth from smashing like china. Her arteries flooded with adrenaline and her heart thrashed against her sternum.

  Outside the window, the ground disappeared. And then, as they cleared the cobalt stratosphere, the solid rocket boosters burned the last of their fuel. Juno sensed the instant they detached because, for a second, the shaking stopped. She pictured the two cylinders falling back on themselves through the sky and into a foreign sea. Then the next stage fired and her spine was slammed back into her seat.

  It was a little like being on a rollercoaster, that quick point when the carriage swings up and the passengers are pushed down, momentarily heavier.

  The crew were speeding to twenty-six times the speed of sound, and for Juno, the acceleration was terrifying. She felt it first in her arms; when she tried to lift them up they crashed back onto the armrest like felled trees. Then the force intensified. They accelerated at 3g and her eyes were pinned open. Juno felt the pull of the force in the sides of her face and around her mouth as the soft tissue peeled away from her bones.

  Six minutes into the flight, she weighed almost four and a half times as much as she did on Earth, and it felt like being buried alive. Her chest was trapped in a tightening vice and drawing every breath was a struggle.

  All the senior crew – the veteran astronauts – had snapped their fingers and told her that the moment of suffering would fly by, but, for Juno, it felt like hours. She couldn’t think past the pressure on her lungs. How long until a bone snapped? What if her heart tore loose from the sinews holding it in her chest and collapsed like a punctured balloon? It felt possible.

  She had seen a video of a pilot sitting up at 3.5g. It took only a few seconds for the blood to drain from his brain into his feet, and for his eyes to roll back as he convulsed into unconsciousness.

  Juno was saved from this because she was lying on her back and because her suit was designed to grip her body and stop her blood pressure from dropping too low.

  When she was finally thrust into orbit, she instantly went from weighing four times as much as she did on Earth to weighing nothing at all. Her brain tried to process the sudden change and for a while – although she was still strapped in her seat – she could not shake the dizzying sensation of tumbling forwards again and again into the control panel by her feet. She had to close her eyes to fight the tide of nausea whirling in her gut.

  When she opened them again, everyone was laughing with nervous relief. The checklist in Dr Golinsky’s hand had begun to float and the mad-eyed statue of St Joseph of Cupertino that Igor had affixed to the dashboard for luck had come unstuck and was hovering in the air.

  Out the window, it had gone from a sunny day to complete blackness. Over her headset, mission control said, ‘Good luck and Godspeed.’

  SHE WOULD PROBABLY NEVER be weightless again, Juno realized with an odd disappointment as she looked for the Damocles through the window. Their little shuttle was due to dock with the imposing ship in thirty minutes and as they approached Juno could start to feel the heaviness of its artificial gravity.

  Like other members of the Beta, she had trained for 200 hours in the Weightless environment Training Facility – a fifteen-metre-deep pool in which scaled-down mock-ups of the Damocles and the Congreve were sunk. Those exhausting days meant that, now, the Beta were expected to take to weightlessness as instinctively as creatures designed for the sky.

  But true weightlessness was different from swimming. Although Juno’s clothes clung and floated around her chest in the same way, there was no real sense of up or down. No pool floor beneath or light refracting above. After a while in the orbiter, her sense of balance disappeared. There was no need for it. She unstrapped from her seat and found that she already knew how to move around the cramped space, the exact right angles to push off surfaces, the amount of force to apply to her weightless limbs. Poppy clapped as Astrid and Jesse turned gleeful somersaults in the air.

  ‘There she is,’ Commander Sheppard said, as Juno turned to see the Damocles rising like a shard of glass out of the shadow of the Earth. It was a strange shape, a long shining central truss banded by three torus decks – which looked like aluminium doughnuts – with no wings or rudders, nothing to suggest flight. It was not streamlined like their shuttle, because it did not need to drill against friction to escape Earth’s atmosphere. It had been assembled in orbit over the past five years – a gradual process that all astronaut candidates for the Beta had followed with hopeful interest, dreaming of making it their home, of walking the round decks or harvesting crops in the glassy greenhouse that ran through its spine.

  Perhaps that was why, as she spotted the glinting vessel, Juno shivered with recognition. She herself had been excited every time a new module had been built, launched into orbit and locked by skilled engineers onto the central truss. She had bought a kit and built her own model of the Damocles to mount on the desk in her bedroom at Dalton, a model with real decks that spun around tiny crawl-spokes, with hollow little bridges running between them all. She had even coloured her own Union Jack with red and blue gel pens and tacked it onto the round control module that protruded from the upper deck.

  However, she suspected her recognition ran a lot deeper than a scale model or simulation mock-ups. She wanted to believe that the reason she felt a twinge of closure as they locked on to the giant vessel was because it was her home.

  As they edged closer to it, gravity tugged at the crew. Juno’s limbs grew heavier and the fluids drained from her face. The congested flu-like feeling that being weightless induced in her sinuses began to clear. The Damocles was equipped with two gravity-dromes that emitted 1g of fictitious force to stop their bones from crumbling and their muscles from atrophying during the long-haul journey.

  When they finally docked, Juno was one of the last to climb out and when she did she felt like a swimmer surfacing, crawling back onto land. Her bones were made of iron, her head a millstone. As she stepped out of the airlock and onto the craft the muscles in her thighs began to tremble. Her first view of the ship was glittering with stars, and then her vision blackened and the floor smacked the side of her body.

  JUNO AWOKE FEELING SPACESICK, shaken to her core by an unfamiliar dread. Had she made a mistake? She had made a mistake. In the window, Earth was bright as a marble and tumbling from view.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’

  Juno looked up to see a pair of steely blue eyes. ‘Dr Golinsky?’ she heard herself say.

  ‘You must have blacked out,’ the doctor said. ‘No, don’t try to get up just yet.’ It took a second for the room to come into focus. Juno lifted her head and felt the bed sway beneath her, so she lay back down.

  The doctor had taken off her spacesuit and changed into uniform: navy overalls and a lab coat. Eliot was also in his uniform overalls, Juno noticed. He was eye-level with her, curled up on the opposite gurney, his face glistening with sweat.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Juno asked. Before he could reply he convulsed and retched into the bucket beside his bed. The air filled with the sharp tang of vomit.

  ‘Spacesick,’ Dr Golinsky said. ‘It should wear off soon, now that we’re back in 1g. I’d prefer not to give him an anti-emetic for it – it’s better to let him adjust to the new acceleration. You can call me Fae from now on. Brits find it easier. Are you okay to sit up?’

  Juno ignored the trembling in her biceps and made a second attempt to lift herself up onto her f
orearms. ‘It seems like low blood sugar,’ the doctor said, emptying a sachet of pink powder into a glass of water and giving it a quick stir. Juno stared at the sparkling liquid, then gulped it down.

  ‘Mmm . . . strawberry,’ she murmured. The sugar was a delight on her tongue.

  ‘Yes, that’s probably it.’ Fae made a quick scribble on her clipboard. ‘Has this ever happened before?’

  ‘No,’ Juno lied.

  ‘You can stay here for a while to rest,’ the doctor said, ‘or maybe you want to nap in your cabin?’

  Juno didn’t want to sleep. ‘Where is Astrid?’ she asked.

  ‘Probably in the crew module,’ said Fae, already ticking off notes on another page. ‘There’ll be a lot to do for the next few days. We’ve worked out a rota, we’ll discuss it tonight. I’ll go and tell Commander Sheppard that all his crew are nominal.’

  “ ‘Nominal”,’ Eliot groaned, and spat into his bucket.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ Fae said. ‘You just have to find your space legs.’ A joke, Juno recognized. Eliot ignored her.

  ‘Do you know where Astrid is?’ Juno asked again.

  ‘I don’t know where anyone is.’ He rolled over on his back and shielded his eyes from the lights.

  ‘Poor thing,’ murmured Fae as she left the room. ‘There’s always one.’

  ‘Actually, one-third of astronauts suffer from some form of space adaptation sickness,’ Eliot said, ‘for her information. It’s not just me . . . and Juno, when you see Harry tell him to go fuck himself.’ Juno winced as she remembered the comments that Harry had made to him that morning over breakfast.