by Temi Oh
There was another susurrus of locks and hydraulics and Jesse turned to find the door of the radiation shelter slide open once more, revealing a tearful Astrid, cradling her hand. Eliot threw up his arms as if to shield himself from an explosion. Igor strode out before the group.
‘What are you doing?’ Harry said.
‘You’re all dead,’ Igor said to the three of them. And Jesse looked up in confusion. He realized that Dr Golinsky’s look of terror had vanished.
‘What?’ Harry asked.
‘You’re too slow,’ Commander Sheppard said. Igor pressed a button on a remote he was holding and the alarms fell silent, leaving a ringing absence in Jesse’s ears.
‘It was just a drill,’ said the doctor.
Jesse wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or angry. He’d been given his life back. His heart was still galloping in his chest, and his legs felt weak under him.
‘Juno.’ Sheppard turned to her, his brow furrowed. ‘What were you doing? When you hear the alarm you come straight here.’
‘But,’ Jesse protested, ‘she couldn’t hear the alarm. She was sleeping in the Atlas module. It’s not her fault. The speaker must be switched off in there.’
‘Good to know. We need to get that repaired tomorrow,’ Sheppard said. ‘That’s the reason we do drills. To learn about hazards like that.’
Harry clenched his fists. ‘I didn’t know we were scheduled a drill. I’m commander-in-training. I should have been informed, at least.’
‘Oh?’ Igor growled, marching forward. ‘I’m a six-time Mars veteran. I can tell you that when there’s a technical failure, a hydrazine leak that leads to a fire or when you are hit by a meteor, when the pressure goes down, there’s no prior warning. No one informs anyone, even you. Disasters can happen at any time and no email is sent round in advance. You kids think that now you’ve made it up here you’ve got to the safe part. That you’re in the home stretch. But I can tell you that the danger has just begun. Don’t get too comfortable.’
He spat the last sentence through gritted teeth, his own fists clenched. Solomon Sheppard put his hand on Igor’s shoulder and laughed into the silence.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘that’s enough. Is everyone all right?’
Jesse looked around at the shell-shocked crew. Both Astrid and Juno had tears in their eyes. Eliot was clutching his stomach as if he was about to be sick, and Poppy was leaning against the door of the shelter as if it was all that was keeping her upright. Solomon Sheppard smiled sympathetically.
‘I think we all learned a few lessons to take away. I want you to think about how we could have made that evacuation more successful and come to our tutorial tomorrow morning with three recommendations. But, for now, crew, get to bed.’
ASTRID
27.05.12
IT WASN’T THE FIRST of her Terra dreams.
When Astrid opened her eyes, her cheek was pressed against wet sand and the sunlight burned. Above her head shone one amber sun, big as a dinner plate. The other, an ivory speck, small enough to cover with a thumbnail at the end of an outstretched hand.
When she sat up, the roar of the waves filled her ears. She watched them crest and then crash against the beach, sending tepid foamy water up the backs of her calves and sucking the sand back to sea. The smell of the water and the silver light glittering across it was no surprise. She had been here before. She had swum right along this stretch of beach, wriggling in delight as colonies of red anemones recoiled from her touch. And, even this afternoon, as she climbed unsteadily to her feet, it was as if she had dug her heels into this shore before.
Across the stunning expanse of water, she could make out the rings of distant planets, arcing against the sky like crescent moons drawn in chalk. After almost a lifetime on the ship, it was a relief to see a horizon. Water vapour rose up off the surface of the sea in billowing clouds and behind her vegetation waxed. Green and yellow plants sprang up in the shadows of alien trees, their hanging vines heavy with strange, beautiful fruits that ripened in the shade.
Even if she wanted to, she could never leave, because rising above the canopy of trees was the gleaming belly of the lander. The one they had used to tear through the atmosphere and crash onto this new and welcoming Earth.
The planet was beautiful. The air was warm, sweet and spiced with the flecks of golden pollen that blew off the blossoms. The sand gave under her feet. Hers were the very first footprints. Astrid smiled as if this brilliant stretch of land had formed just for her. And perhaps it had. She was home, and she could feel it right to the marrow of her bones.
Later in the day, she would stretch out under the mottled shade of the trees to rest. Next week, in her position as Terra’s first astrobiologist, she would lead an expedition further into the forest with the hope of making it all the way to the peaks of the mountains beyond. She would slip into the healing water of the lagoons, which the ship’s navigator told her lay several miles east. After a year or two, voyagers from the Gamma, Delta and epsilon missions would people this Earth, filling the air with hybrid languages and native songs. They would invent new, thoughtful customs, celebrate their arrival, tell each other again and again the story of the journey. When her hair began to silver, Astrid would wrap the first new baby in her arms and say, ‘Everything good is happening at the same time.’
There was so much ahead. There was so much to discover that Astrid would never have her fill of wonder.
Someone was calling her name.
Astrid’s eyes followed the footprints along the shore and she was surprised to find her sister standing in the sand, one hand on her hip and the other shielding her eyes from the sun. She called Astrid’s name again. Behind her was a hand-painted flag. It cracked in the wind and swayed on a flagpole twice her height.
‘Astrid!’
The whites of Juno’s eyes were visible in the darkness of the dormitory. She leant up on her elbows and scowled.
‘Astrid, your alarm is ringing.’ Astrid became aware of the persistent buzz of the clock on her bedside table, and the tight edge in her sister’s voice.
‘Switch it off.’
As she fumbled for the button, Juno wriggled back under her duvet. ‘Don’t set it so early if you can’t wake up for it.’
‘I am awake,’ Astrid said, rubbing her eyes.
She thought she could still feel the sand of Terra-Two between her toes.
‘Juno?’
‘What?’
‘Have you ever dreamt of Terra-Two?’
‘Not really.’ She yawned and rolled over. ‘We’ve never been there. What would I dream about?’
‘I—’
‘It’s five a.m., Astrid. It’s too early to chat.’
Swinging her legs from under the duvet, Astrid climbed out of bed. The cycling lights in the corridor were turning the tepid amber of a sunrise. The crew module was quiet; everyone was still asleep. In an hour and a half the morning alarm would ring, the lights above her would brighten to mimic the vivid blue of a morning sky, the thunder of the crew’s footsteps would roll down the halls. They had been on the ship for two weeks now, and Astrid was surprised to find that the routine was not so different from the one they had fallen into at the space centre. They would gather around the same time in the kitchen and jostle for the coffee machine or trail sticky crumbs across the counter. At 7.30 they sat together around the kitchen table for the Daily Planning Conference. Commander Sheppard would read out a list of duties for that day, and any notices that had been uplinked from ground control the night before, then they would disperse and join the senior crew for their individual tutorials before regrouping for lunch.
That morning, Astrid thought that she might make a late start on some tutorial work that Igor had set them before their lesson later that day. She headed to the upper deck and around to the kitchen.
On her way, she passed the open door to Cai’s bedroom. The hydroponics expert was expected to arrive on a shuttle the following day. Whenever Astrid imagined
him, she pictured his skin – would it be gun-metal grey from lack of sunlight? Would his bones be long and thin, distorted by the low gravity of Mars?
Further along the corridor she was distracted by the sound of a child’s voice. It was a young boy’s, filtering thinly through the open hatch by the flight deck. ‘. . . Daddy? When are you coming home?’
‘Stop asking him,’ said a woman.
‘I told you.’ Solomon Sheppard’s voice was still rough from sleep, undulating the way adults tended to when speaking to a child. ‘When you get a little older, you’ll come up here and live with me. In the place I’m going. Everyone will.’
‘Mummy too?’
‘Don’t put ideas into his head,’ said the woman. ‘Can you just sing. He won’t go to sleep if . . .’
Astrid stepped a little closer. The control deck was like an arcade, a wonder of maps, dials and spinning gauges, hundreds of colour-coded buttons lit up on different dashboards. A vast array of glowing monitors displaying the status of key components of the ship, close-circuit television screens, hand controls like joysticks.
She pressed her face against the glass to get a better view of the commander, speaking to his young son and wife. She had forgotten he was married. His wife was a fragile copper-skinned creature, cradling her son’s head against her chest. Already, her son looked bigger than Astrid remembered him. Commander Sheppard’s wife had been balancing him on her hip as she waved goodbye to the ship on launch day. Astrid had been too excited to think much of it, and Commander Sheppard rarely talked about his family. Astrid wondered, now, what Sheppard’s dreams were of Terra-Two – if he pictured it as a place for his children to grow old by his side.
‘I’ll sing your mum’s favourite,’ Solomon said, winking at his wife. Then he began to sing, and Astrid gasped in recognition. It was a Smiths song she’d loved growing up. She closed her eyes, pressing her face against the doorframe. She could almost hear the tristful guitar chords under his tenor. He was still humming it when the call shut off and the room filled with the grey light of static.
‘I love that song,’ Astrid said, opening her eyes finally.
‘Oh, really?’ Commander Sheppard must have known she was standing there, because he didn’t start or even turn around. He leant forward in his chair and pressed his hand against the monitor, as if it was a window to a darkened bedroom back on Earth.
‘How old is your son?’ Astrid asked. She felt the way she used to when they left Dalton on the weekends and spotted their teachers laughing together in the Café Nero at the train station or holding a pint at the local pub. It was like spotting a rare bird out of its habitat.
‘Three. I won’t be able to talk to him for much longer. There’s already a bit of a lag. And by the time we pass Mars real-time conversation with the Earth will already be impossible.’
‘Does your son want to be an astronaut as well?’
‘What three-year-old doesn’t?’ Sheppard turned in his seat. ‘But soon he won’t have a choice. The world is about to change, Astrid. Before the end of this century, the average global sea level is expected to rise six to nine metres. Half of the world’s population lives close to the sea and at about four degrees of warming, scientists are expecting the loss of all coastal cities. Venice, New Orleans, Tokyo, Dhaka . . . countries will be rendered entirely uninhabitable, vast swathes of North Africa and the Middle east, Central America. It will cause a new kind of refugee crisis, millions and millions homeless, destitute.
‘Can’t you see it happening now? An increase of extreme weather events, heatwaves and food shortages. Britain may be the first nation to land on Terra-Two, but how long until everyone who can afford it will flock to the skies? One day soon, there will be no “astronauts” or “pilgrims”, only “refugees”, “immigrants” and “fellow travellers”.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘My son will likely have no choice,’ he finally said. ‘Nor will his sons and daughters.’
Astrid nodded. She had heard talk like this before. She’d been born in the generation where they learned about climate change in geography and science classes from age nine. Heard about it so often that Astrid regarded global warming with the same limp and abstract horror as she did when she thought about the certainty of the sun dying and engulfing the Earth. The last Christmas had been particularly mild, and Astrid had even spotted daffodils sprouting near the wire fence around the churchyard. Everyone discussed the balmy weather and acknowledged their mutual and distant concern about global warming. Astrid sometimes guiltily indulged the thought that she would not be around to see it happen.
‘After being captain of this ship, my main responsibility involves writing reports about the progress and success of this mission and sending them back to Earth in the hopes that more like these will soon follow. Mass off-world colonization. For everyone. Not only the chosen few. I want to make that a reality.’
Astrid stepped further into the room and noticed with a start that Solomon was not wearing any shoes. These were the daily intimacies she’d have to get used to. Living with Solomon Sheppard, Astrid was able to witness the legend up close. To look at the bare soles of the youngest Brit on Mars, and become familiar with his daily routines. In the past two weeks of living on the ship, Astrid had noticed that he prayed five times a day on a mat he laid out in his bedroom. He didn’t drink coffee, but every morning he prepared himself a pot of peppermint tea, which he drank slowly and then cleaned meticulously. He liked jazz. Instead of a morning bell, he blasted John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space through the speakers, so that every morning the crew awoke to the crashing cymbals of ‘Mars’.
‘Was it hard to leave them?’ she asked, changing the subject and nodding at the computer monitor. Solomon shrugged again. They were on London time on the ship but in Houston – where his family had moved to – it was six hours behind.
‘It was hard,’ he said. ‘For Na’imah. But then she knew what she signed up for when she married me.’
Astrid was trying to figure out exactly how old Solomon was. When he’d been selected as the only Brit to fly to the Russian station on Mars, he had also been the youngest astronaut in history, at just twenty-five. Astrid had been eight or nine, then, which made him . . .
‘You know what that song’s about right?’ she asked. He shook his head, eyes blank and tired. ‘It’s about hope. You know, “the light”? The light that never goes out.’
‘Right.’ He half smiled. ‘Of course. That’s what brought us up here. That’s all that can keep us.’
POPPY
29.05.12
TWO WEEKS ON THE Damocles and Poppy was already tired of hearing Astrid talk about Terra-Two. She could not imagine the schools of silver fish that lanced through lagoons, or the periwinkle birds’ eggs nested in leaves, or the mountain ranges where the suns never set.
For herself, Poppy couldn’t wait to see the green prospect of Terra-Two in the window of the ship. The thought of taking the shuttle down into the atmosphere and leaving the first human footprints on white alien shores made her stomach quiver with excitement. And yet the finer details of her life on Terra-Two had always been vague. She never understood how it was possible to ache like Astrid for a land she had never travelled. Earth was enough for her.
Earth had always been enough for her, and she realized it only when it was gone.
There was a Portuguese word for it that Poppy knew: saudade. A longing for something that might never return.
After the launch, Poppy had witnessed her first orbital sunrise through the window of the shuttle an hour before they were due to rendezvous with the Damocles. They had been allowed to float out of their seats and gaze out the window at Earth below. For most of their journey the planet had been cast in shadow, a black and swollen ocean. Poppy watched as it tumbled slowly out of the way of the sun. Dawn began as an electric-blue arc of light cresting above the horizon, and when the sun appeared it was a fire-red pea on the perimeter, which burst forth, turning white and filling the porthole with
brilliant rays of light. Everyone turned for just a second; even Fae and Igor stopped what they were doing, looked up from their monitors and craned their necks to gaze down at their old home.
There is a strange disassociation that comes from seeing something for the first time in real life when you have seen it thousands of times before on television or in magazines. The Eiffel Tower, the Angel of the North, a total solar eclipse. Poppy had anticipated that she would feel that same detached familiarity when she finally saw Earth. But that afternoon after the launch, in the shuttle, Poppy realized that she had been mistaken. Realized that, in the vast solar system, her planet was the greatest sight to see. Impossible not to marvel at it. To tremble in its light. Whorls of clouds, larger than mountains but delicate as breath, ivory vapour trails, so much dark sea. When she finally beheld it, with her own eyes, and not through satellite images or computer reconstructions, she began to cry. She felt like Lot’s wife as she gazed at the deserts and the sea. Ripples in the sand dunes appeared as black striations against the golden ground. The coastlines were a brilliant chrome blue and the mountain ranges were like scars on the Earth. Poppy felt it for the first time – a scintilla of doubt. Her own sickness, homesickness.
To her relief, in the tumult of the days that followed – when they were settling into the Damocles and every hour was filled with work – she would only remember that feeling whenever she awoke in the night with a jolt and saw, in the porthole of her bedroom, only darkness.
Their days on the Damocles were similar to their final day before the launch. They were expected to wake by 6.30 for a full day of classes, tutorials and three hours of chores required for the maintenance and upkeep of their home. The only free time that Poppy could really enjoy was after dinner, at 8 p.m. The Atlas – the observation capsule near the greenhouse – had become her favourite place to lounge. It was just big enough for two people to sit on the little bench in front of the glass. There was a telescope and a monitor displaying a star map, and when she touched the screen it answered her questions about the constellations. Poppy would climb the ladder up to the little room, look back at Earth and read about Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Fornax, Orion . . . every one.