by Temi Oh
The small windowless room was claustrophobic and the acrid smell of sick made Juno’s stomach roil. She stepped unsteadily off the bed, her head still swimmy and light, and followed Fae out.
It took a moment for Juno to figure out where she was based on the mental map she had of the vessel. She had just left the infirmary, which was on the upper deck. She had to walk all the way around the circular corridor to get her bearings. To her left were four cabins with the names of the senior crew printed on the doors:
Commander Solomon Sheppard – Commander/Pilot
Igor Bovarin – Flight Engineer/Educator
Dr Friederike Golinsky – Flight Surgeon/Educator
Dr Cai Tsang – Botanist/Hydroponics Expert
That last room was empty, and although a pile of bleached white sheets had been left on the bed, no one had taken the time to strip the plastic off the mattress yet.
The kitchen was filled with sealed boxes, and although the counters were gleaming and untouched, particles of dust glittered in the air and the place smelt unfamiliar.
‘You’re alive.’ Harry was seated at the table, his face illuminated in the light of his personal computer.
‘Fortunately,’ Juno said, stepping inside.
‘I hear Eliot is sick too,’ Harry said, a smile curling at the edge of his mouth, ‘should have listened to me.’
‘Oh.’ Jesse, who had been leaning on the counter at the far end of the room, looked up as if Juno was a ghost. ‘It’s Juno Juma, right?’
‘Right. Most people find it hard to tell us apart at first.’
The colour rose in his cheeks, ‘Well, you know – fifty per cent chance,’ he admitted.
It had been more difficult when they were younger. Juno and Astrid had dressed in identical outfits until they were fourteen. But, four years on, the differences between the twins were obvious. Astrid wore make up, lined her eyes with kohl and painted her lashes emerald or tangerine. She wore tie-dyed dresses and sandals, while Juno wore either her uniform or shapeless utilitarian clothes that looked like uniform.
‘What happened to you?’ Jesse asked.
‘Low blood sugar, probably.’
‘Right.’ He reached out and offered her a bag of Fruit Pastilles. ‘Well, have some of these.’
Juno looked down at the rainbow-coloured sweets.
‘You sure about that?’ Harry glanced knowingly at Juno from across the room.
‘Sure about what?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘Don’t take food from strangers.’
‘Jesse’s not a stranger,’ Juno said, although she couldn’t help but notice how different he looked from the boy they had trained with only a few months ago. His hair was long now, braided. His whole face hollowed out with a kind of gaunt beauty.
Reaching into the packet, she pulled out a yellow pastille and put it into her mouth. It was lemon flavoured, sharply sweet, and stuck like mud to the back of her teeth. ‘Have the whole thing,’ Jesse said, offering her the packet again. ‘It’s bad for me to be eating so many sweets anyway.’
‘Well, by all means, give them to her.’ Harry rolled his eyes, then pulled his headphones out of the socket on his computer. ‘Come and look at this.’
Juno crossed the room to peer over Harry’s shoulder. On the screen was a news segment, the headlines rolling across the bottom.
‘A historic day for Britain . . .’ the suited reporter said, shouting over the noise of the crowd. ‘From the early morning hours thousands gathered near Sandsend Fields to catch a glimpse of the launch . . .’
There was a slow montage of all their faces and Juno noticed Harry gazing out at the crowd, his hair lit up by the noon-time sun. For a second she saw what they saw. A handsome leader who exuded a cool confidence.
‘Lift-off! We have lift-off. At twelve minutes past the hour: lift-off for Expedition One.’ From the cameraman’s vantage point the shuttle was as little as a toothpick, trailing ribbons of smoke as it lanced against the cloudless sky. In three seconds, it was out of sight.
It was difficult to believe that morning she had been on Earth. Already, it felt like a dream. The shouting crowds in the bleachers, the reporters, the brass band . . .
Juno had been so busy over the past few months that there had been no time to think. But now, a frightening notion nudged to the surface of her sleep-addled mind. What if she hadn’t been brave, choosing to leave? What if she had only been blind? Trading everything she knew, everyone she loved, the rest of her life, for mere promises.
‘Where is Astrid?’ she asked, feeling the clench in her throat.
Harry shrugged. ‘Downstairs, probably.’ He rewound the clip and began to watch it again.
Juno left the kitchen and climbed through the hatch to the middle deck. ‘Astrid?’ She felt disorientated and bereft. Once she found her twin she might be okay. She might be able to orient herself, like a shipwrecked sailor in relation to a star.
Juno searched the large crew module, then the girls’ cabin.
‘Heya.’ Poppy’s voice was bright as the door slid open. Their cabin was small. Two bunk-beds nestled into the wall with a patterned curtain for privacy, like a Japanese capsule hotel. Juno’s eyes roamed to the stacked boxes at the far end of the room, to the names written on them, to the one marked Ara. ‘Yeah.’ Poppy followed her gaze and sighed. ‘I don’t know what to do with it? And we have a spare bed as well now . . . we’ll have to swap one of the bunk-beds with the boys, since they have one extra. Oh hey, I forgot to ask. Are you okay?’
‘Low blood sugar.’
‘Right, right. Can you hold this for a moment?’ Poppy thrust a box in Juno’s direction and rummaged around in it for a while, before pulling out a clattering string of fairy-lights. Then she searched around for a socket before plugging them in and deactivating the main lights. The room was suffused in a warm amber glow. ‘Good thing I thought to bring them.’ Poppy smiled, ‘And my duvet covers. Makes the room look more homey. Don’t you think?’ She flopped back on her floral-print quilt. Only Poppy would have thought of such details. Astrid and Juno had brought comfortable clothes and books in one box, Earth food they would never see again in another: canned peaches, cookie mix, marshmallows, hundreds and thousands.
Poppy had packed frilly throws and crepe-paper lanterns, a black and white print of Audrey Hepburn. Everything they’d packed had been sent up to the shuttle months ago and was covered now in a thin layer of dust. Other items had been launched years ago; a two-decade supply of toothpaste sponsored by Colgate, microfibre duvets from John Lewis. Heinz had donated 100,000 cartons of dehydrated soup and baked beans.
‘Do you think the bed could fit two?’ Poppy flopped back onto it.
‘Planning on inviting anyone?’ Juno asked. Poppy smiled mysteriously and tapped her nose. Juno shuddered at the thought and changed the subject. ‘Have you seen my sister?’
‘She was in here a minute ago,’ Poppy said, making a snow angel in her duvet covers.
‘Was she?’
‘Like . . . yeah, well maybe half an hour ago?’
‘Did you see where she went?’
‘I dunno, maybe she’s down in the hold.’
But Astrid wasn’t there either; the large gloomy room under the ship that held supplies in sealed, colour-coded boxes. She wasn’t in the greenhouse, the bathroom or the boys’ cabin. Juno was beginning to grow frantic, retracing her steps, calling out her sister’s name as maddened thoughts began to rush through her head. What if they’d left Astrid behind somehow, and Juno was spinning out into space, away from her?
Juno felt the way she did during the nights when she was young, when she woke up in their shared bedroom groping around in the darkness, post-nightmare, for a warm body that she recognized.
‘Astrid,’ she cried out as she looked around this new place. It was nothing like home. It smelt bitter and synthetic, like burning polymers and heated metal. It would take her a while to adjust to the level of noise as well; the mechanical whir and
hum of machines rattling under the floorboards, the whoosh of air through the vents and the constant deep-sea moan of the motors whipping around the central truss made Juno wonder if she would ever sleep soundly again. And the walls felt like ice, Juno noticed, the metal was cold like space was cold. This was going to be her home for two decades.
Twenty-three years in this tin box the size of a townhouse. Back on Earth, twenty-three years had merely been a bridge to cross to get to Terra-Two, foreshortened by her own anticipation. In twenty-three years she would be forty-one – as old as her parents were now – and she would have lived in the darkness for more years than she had lived under a sky. This is my new life, she thought with a sinking in her stomach. Suddenly, it didn’t matter how fast they travelled – how many fractions of the speed of light they reached – Terra-Two still seemed terribly distant.
‘Astrid!’ she yelled, her voice threatening tears.
‘Juno?’ came a muffled reply. She heard it, or she thought she heard it, from behind the heavy door of the engine room.
Juno found her twin hugging her knees in the corner, half-hidden behind a bundle of pipes and wires. ‘Astrid?’
‘Yeah . . .’ Astrid’s voice was thick, drowned by the shriek of an exhaust fan. Juno fumbled for the light switch but her fingers found nothing, so when the door slammed shut behind her, she could only see by the blinking glow of the computer displays in the corner, and the quicksilver flashes of light reflected off the steel blades of a fan.
‘I couldn’t find you.’ Juno groped around in the darkness for Astrid, until her fingers caught between the soft folds of her cardigan. ‘I thought . . . I thought . . .’ The thought was too horrible.
‘I just wanted to be alone for a bit,’ Astrid said. ‘I’m just grateful I made it.’ Juno put her head in her sister’s lap. And as she did so, she felt an inward release of pressure. The feeling of being home.
Juno and Astrid had been born three and a half weeks early. Their mother had told them the story only once, described the trauma she had suffered, the blood loss. The isolating terror of that night. And when the sun rose, their mother, delirious with exhaustion, had gazed at them – these keening blue creatures that the doctors had ripped from her – and said to their father, ‘We can’t undo it now.’ Words that had frightened Juno for years. Her mother had been saying that she would never not be a mother. That when she laid eyes on the twins, the permanence of her new status hit her with a sudden and brutal force. She would be their mother until she died and even after.
‘Did we make a mistake?’ Juno asked. Astrid was making quick sharp gasping sounds, her shoulders shuddering. ‘Are you crying?’ Juno strained to discern her sister’s face in the darkness. Her cheeks glistened. She nodded.
‘Do you think we made a mistake?’ Juno ventured again.
Astrid shook her head.
‘Are you homesick?’
Astrid shook her head again.
JESSE
13.05.12
UNLIKE OTHER MEMBERS OF the crew, he had not spent as much time training in a mock-up of the ship. He didn’t already know where everything was and no one had the patience to help him. So Jesse spent most of the afternoon exploring on his own. There were three main decks; the crew’s living quarters and bathroom were in the middle, while the seniors resided on the top deck near the command module. Harry and Solomon Sheppard were already there when Jesse reached it, but he shivered with excitement nonetheless. The control deck was the glittering nucleus of the ship, it was filled with light, dazzling star-maps and spinning astrolabes, the screens of a dozen monitors reeling off endless dizzying scrolls of data. It was a fantasy just standing here. Jesse watched for a moment as Harry took it all in, stroking the leather-backed commander’s chair and the pilot’s seat beside it, as if he, himself, could not believe his luck.
‘It begins today,’ Solomon Sheppard said with a smile.
Jesse had grown up wondering how it felt to be people like Harrison Bellgrave. Surely boys like Harry believed that greatness was their birthright. Strode through life, their hands open for the Oscar, the medals, the knighthood, while people like Jesse crouched in their shadow. The awkward interloper.
‘Ready to feel the burn,’ Harry joked to their commander. Now that they’d arrived on the Damocles, Harry and Commander Sheppard would perform the engine burn that would boost them out of Earth’s orbit. Jesse watched the scene now, with some bitterness.
Like Harry and a large number of students at Dalton, Jesse had fought to be accepted on the pilot stream in his fourth year, when they choose specialisms. The pilot stream students trained in a separate facility, miles from Dalton, where they could practise flying for hours a day. Perhaps because of this separation, and because it was widely understood that the deputy commander would be chosen from this gifted group, the stream took on a glittering mystique, and in reverent tones was referred to as ‘Command School’. Jesse himself had spent all of two weeks in Command School. He’d fought against the teachers at every turn. He had not wanted to cut his hair short, like the rest of the Command School students with their androgynous buzzcuts – the research scientists performed EEGs while the students flew and it was easier to measure their brain’s electrical activity when they didn’t have long locks of hair on their heads. He’d hated the loneliness of it, twelve-hour days locked in damp simulation cubicles, flying through virtual space for so long that during his brief trips outside he became fixated by the sight of the sun as if he’d stolen a glance at the face of God.
Jesse was already behind, even that first week. Many of the students, like Harry, had already logged years of private flying lessons on their families’ estates, or at their town’s aerodrome. But Jesse struggled with every test and knew that if his average kept dropping he would be thrown out of Dalton by November half-term. So he placed a request to switch to the least competitive stream: hydroponics. Six months spent baking under the dome of the greenhouse, or bent over trays of static solution cultures, and his score went up. It turned out that Jesse had a knack for working with living things. But he could not stifle the sting of regret, or the shame of failure.
In the end, his defection from Command School had still only earned him a place on the backup crew.
‘Jesse Solloway.’ Jesse was startled by the German accent of their doctor. For a second, he wondered if he was in trouble, if he had no right to be on the control deck. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you are just the person I’ve been looking for. Can you do something for me?’
She wanted him to take a box of the dead girl’s things down to the cargo bay, and Jesse realized, from her hushed tones, that she wanted him to keep it a secret.
She was everywhere, the dead girl. Not more than twenty-four hours after it had happened and her dark presence already permeated the ship, stood between Jesse and the rest of the crew, lingered at the end of every unfinished sentence. Her name, ARA SHAH, was embossed on the door to the girls’ cabin, above Astrid’s. Her spacesuit was boxed up next to theirs in the equipment bay, a hard shell custom-made for her dimensions.
Jesse could think of no good reason to object, and soon he found himself hauling the crate down the hatch to the lower deck, where the whirring of machines was louder and the fluorescent lights hissed like wasps. He held the barcode on the box against the scanner and the monitor flashed green. ‘EARTH CARGO’, it read, ‘miscellaneous/personal effects/SHAH, ARA.’ Jesse knew that this box, like many of the crew’s belongings, had been sent up to the Damocles four months ago with the final supply shuttle. She would have been alive back then. Her name on the screen sent a little thrill of curiosity through him, and as he pushed inside the dully lit room, Jesse gave in to it and pried the box open.
Although most of her clothes were vacuum-packed, the box was filled with the powdery, fresh smell that Jesse associated with the female dormitory at Dalton. The faint aroma of orange blossom and jasmine. It was like a time-capsule of a teenage girl. A box of souvenir plectrums printed wi
th the Union Jack, a string of Mardi Gras beads, an ornate hairbrush with strands of thick black hair twisted in its teeth, crushed Chinese lanterns and Polaroids. One of Eliot Liston asleep and splayed atop a mountain range of rumpled duvets. Another one of her own young self, fingers pressed against a fretboard, sitting on the refectory table. Jesse thought he remembered the incident. One lunchtime Ara and her friends had surprised onlookers with an impromptu performance of ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’, which earned them a standing ovation. At the time, Jesse had been quietly annoyed, but now he realized that he’d only been jealous. Jealous of the self-assured way that Ara grabbed at the world, with a foolhardy optimism. Her class believed that if she was not chosen for the Beta she would rise to fame in some other way, as a musician or a striking and strange runway model. She had talent and intelligence, and the unwavering love of Eliot Liston in one of those freak school romances that survived more than a summer. To Jesse, she’d seemed to have everything.
For the first time, he wondered about the person whose destiny he’d stolen. He could not fathom the darkness of a girl who could leap to her death.
What was left of her? This feeble assortment of items, vacuum-packed clothes, a spiral-bound journal with an illustration of a half blown-out dandelion clock on the cover, little seedlings carried on an imaginary wind, off the page. Jesse opened the book and flicked through it. Scrawled dates and doodles looping through margins. Moons. Falling leaves. The rings of Saturn. Thickly-lashed asymmetrical eyes. He turned right to the last page and found a blurred satellite picture of Terra-Two. In my dreams, she had written, I’m already up there.
HARRY
13.05.12
THERE HAD BEEN NO uncertainty in this arrival. No failed viva or imperfect test score, no lost tournament, not one moment during selection when Harry had questioned if he was talented enough, hard-working enough, deserving enough to make the Beta. He had never looked around at the others and asked, Why me? Why not? It had been his will to succeed, and so he had succeeded. The skill of his hands and the unwavering force of his determination had propelled him towards this moment. The afternoon after the launch, the first day on the ship.