Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

by Temi Oh

  She loved watching when the planet rolled in front of the sun, and the cities began to blaze against its shadowed face. Through their telescope, she could pick out London and Lagos and the whole of the east coast of America through a recognisable lacework of roads. By day, the cities were cement-coloured smudges against the land, indistinguishable from the grey-green of suburbs and countryside, but, at night, humanity shouted its existence at the stars. Poppy could tell the population density from the sodium orange belts of light that made up roads, country borders and interstate boundaries. Japanese cities burned blue-green, and a bright sprawl of mercury vapour lamps illuminated the streets along the black hollow of Tokyo Bay. Their commander pointed out Mecca, a patch of light against a jet desert, and the interstate highway that lanced across el Paso. All the places she would never go.

  ‘No wonder there’s global warming,’ Juno said that night, leaning into the window to take a photograph, ‘when you look at all this. There are so many people. It’s so bright.’

  ‘I can still see London,’ said Poppy.

  ‘It looks like a neuron,’ Juno said, jostling for the eyepiece. Poppy knew what she meant. The glowing nucleus branching off in glittering interlocking trails of light. The Thames slit a dark line through the city and opened like an inky mouth at the estuary.

  ‘Do you think they can still see us?’

  ‘Not likely,’ Juno said, shrugging, ‘not without a telescope.’

  Viewed from the side, Poppy could see the opalescent layers of the planet’s atmosphere. It looked as delicate as a bubble and yet it kept the world beneath them alive. It trapped in heat, it set fire to rogue asteroids on course for civilization and protected the life below from cosmic radiation. For a few days, their course had been on the right latitude for Poppy to see streams of charged particles sucked into the Earth’s magnetic field. They smashed into atoms in the upper atmosphere and excited electrons. The Northern Lights. Whenever she gazed at them, she thought about what a great thing it was to be alive right at that moment.

  There were people on Earth squinting through telescopes and following the progress of the Damocles through the sky. Is my mother one of them? Poppy wondered sometimes. Her mother was the only one she was leaving behind. Just weeks into their mission and she only communicated with her daughter in cryptic emails, hyperlinked articles that Poppy couldn’t always open, photographs of horoscopes cut out from the local newspaper or screenshots from websites. Poppy never knew how to reply. She always wondered if her mother scoured the internet for the predictions she knew were relevant – perhaps that was why the most recent had read:

  Virgo: Jupiter continues to transit your solar ninth house. Under this influence, you may have opportunities to travel, study abroad and expand your horizons.

  Whenever she opened a link to another horoscope, Poppy couldn’t figure out if she was confused or disappointed. She had been glad to leave her mother behind, and every time she was glad she was also guilty.

  Dear Poppy, this year eclipses will fall into your solar fourth and tenth houses and third and ninth houses. The sun is setting fast. Take a stand against disillusion. Good things can last.

  Did she think that Poppy would understand her, now that they had the stars in common?

  ELIOT

  03.06.12

  ELIOT KEPT THINKING ABOUT Cai’s life on Mars. The man had arrived in his own shuttle, a week earlier, worn out by his journey. They’d all stood by the hatch grinning, and Poppy had painted a banner saying ‘Welcome’. As the hatch opened they all clapped, but Cai greeted the crew with a narrow-eyed snarl, so exhausted by the ship’s gravity that he slumped against the airlock wall. He was in his fifties and had spent most of his life on Mars, talking to computer monitors and plants. He had engineered anaerobic cacti that flourished in the arid craters of that planet, tended to oxygen gardens and landscaped botanical parks. He’d spent so long on Elysium Mons that most of his equipment was still stained the haematic red of the soil. Eliot had heard Igor say that they had been lucky to recruit him for this mission. Cai had been coming to end of his tenure at the International Laboratory and was looking to discover, for himself, what alien plant life blossomed in the soil of Terra-Two.

  Years spent hunched in the low gravity of Mars had altered him forever, stretched his bones long and thin. He stood, now, at almost seven feet, his femurs and spine grossly elongated but brittle as a bird’s. He could barely stand in the 1g force on most of the ship and preferred to spend his time in the greenhouse, where the gravity was 60 per cent that of the Earth’s.

  Cai’s arrival had been exciting for the Beta crew for all of five minutes. He spoke little, rarely turned up to dinner and when he did he was sullen and ornery, his mouth turned down as if he was sucking on something sour. ‘Poorly socialized’ was the phrase that Eliot had heard Fae whisper.

  Eliot wondered what it had been like to be alone for that long. He wanted to ask him, but was nervous about approaching the older man. In between the arrival and departure of various international expeditions, Cai had manned the Mars laboratory alone, living on the same cycle of freeze-dried meals and thumbing through the same old paperbacks abandoned in the library.

  The reporters on Earth had regularly posed that same question to all of the members of the Beta: how do you cope with the isolation on board the ship? They didn’t know that, in some ways, this was the least alone Eliot had been his whole life. Sharing a room with other boys, the constant chatter that rumbled through the walls from morning bell until night, the regular keening of various life-support machines. Everything was shared, the one-size-fits-all jumpsuits that they all took turns scrubbing and then posting into their uniform cubbyholes on the lower deck, the bedsheets and most of the food. The board games donated by various charities and the vast library of TV shows and movies and books stored in the ship’s databank.

  He’d said to the reporters, ‘I’m handling the loneliness just fine.’ But he never mentioned the other kind of loneliness that was eating him like a cancer; the constant phantom-limb pain of grief over Ara’s death. He was certain that everyone could see his suffering and was wincing at the sight of it. So most of the time Eliot communicated with the rest of the crew from behind the lens of a camera, which made them smile dumbly at him and stare straight through.

  What was Mars like? he wondered. Was the ground soft like sand underfoot, or was it cracked as skin and stone-hard?

  Some months, Cai had been the only person on the entire planet.

  ‘How did you fight the loneliness?’ Eliot finally summoned the courage to ask him one evening after dinner.

  Cai did not look up. ‘Are you filming me?’ he asked, tipping heaped teaspoons of sugar into his coffee.

  ‘Not yet,’ Poppy said, turning to Eliot just to double check the light on the side of his camera. Then she looked back at Cai and asked, ‘How can you drink that stuff? It tastes as if it was made in a lab. It tastes like lighter fluid.’

  ‘Is lighter fluid a popular beverage in England?’ Cai asked, his mouth curling a little.

  Poppy and Eliot had been instructed, by a few producers at the Interplanetary Channel, to downlink more footage of the elusive new astronaut.

  ‘Everybody has their drug of choice,’ Cai said. His nervous fingers drew a circle around the rim of his cup. Eliot noticed that they were stained the acid-green of the fertilizer he handled all day. ‘Though,’ Cai continued, ‘spend as long as I have in space and you’ll discover that choice really has very little to do with it.’ Finally, he turned to the camera with his grey eyes. ‘Put that thing down, would you?’

  Eliot obliged.

  ‘Now, what did you ask me?’ Cai asked.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the loneliness?’

  Blood flooded Eliot’s cheeks. He hadn’t realized that he’d asked the question out loud. ‘Nothing,’ he said. Cai simply stared at him, his stained fingers making hollow tapping sounds on the side of his cup.

  �
��I mean,’ Poppy said, to fill the silence, looking between the two men, ‘you haven’t set foot on Earth for over thirty years.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ Cai said.

  ‘Is there something you miss the most?’ she asked.

  The scientist took a moment to think and then said, ‘Nothing at all. You know, there is nothing about this life that does not suit me. There were 2.7 billion people on Earth the year I was born and now there are 7 billion. Sometimes I used to lie awake at night and think about all the people in the world. Jumbled hive of consciousness, trillions of busy multiplying cells. It was claustrophobic. There is no frontier left to discover, down there. Almost every inch of the Earth has been trodden under a million feet. Photographed hundreds of thousands of times. But,’ and he closed his eyes, ‘to be alone is divine. To trek through lightless craters, leave the first and sole footprints on Martian mountains. Tear through the hard vacuum of space unfettered by the sickly mass of humanity we left behind.’ He leant forward and caught Eliot’s gaze. ‘There is only yourself, first and last. Meet him with courage, meet him with gladness. There is only one. There is love to be found. Adventure to be had.’

  Eliot shifted uncomfortably, then pressed record on his camera, if only to put a barrier between himself and this man. ‘I . . .’ he said, ‘I’ve been told to go around the ship and ask everyone about their first impressions of life on board. I only have you and Jesse Solloway left.’

  Cai stared unsmilingly at the camera. ‘Nothing to report. Progress has been good. About fifty years ago, before fictitious-force gravity-dromes were widely used, a lot of the time aboard a new craft was spent adjusting to zero gravity. That’s no longer an impediment; with our feet firmly on the ground, I’ve spent the past week or so making the ship habitable. As the hydroponics expert, I spend a lot of my time up in the greenhouse growing the plants that in a year or two we will come to rely on as our primary food source and which will provide and filter a small percentage of our oxygen. Needless to say, this is a vital role and that is the reason I was scheduled to rendezvous with the Damocles so early on in the mission instead of in a month when the ship flies-by Mars.

  ‘At the time of this recording, we have twenty-three years until we reach Terra. Twenty-one days down, approximately 8,374 to go.’ Cai set his empty mug in the sink before he left the room.

  ‘Was it good?’ Poppy asked, leaning over Eliot’s shoulder while he played the recording over again. She crossed the name ‘Cai Tsang’ off their list. ‘Only one left,’ she said, then brushed her fingers across her forehead with a frown. ‘You know, could you do the last one alone? I think I have a bit of a headache. I might go and lie down.’

  Eliot gritted his teeth and headed downstairs to find Jesse.

  Jesse and Eliot had never been good friends. Their social circles did not intersect, and the only term they had lived together was in the first year of sixth form, when Eliot had been assigned Jesse as a roommate.

  On the face of it, the two boys had cohabited for ten weeks in a kind of awkward peace. But Eliot, who had always been terrified of confrontation, found Jesse’s strange habits deeply irritating. He despised the smell of incense, which Jesse burned whenever the dormitory was empty in flagrant disregard of the school’s fire-safety regulations, so that their room smelt like a hippy curiosity shop. He hated the other boy’s slovenliness. Eliot alphabetized his DVD collection; Jesse discarded his boxers like orange peels across the rug, alongside foil wrappers of cereal bars spewing stale crumbs. The odd hours he kept, waking up late and then staying awake until the early hours of the morning, his skin sickly in the wan light of his computer, googling diseases and then examining the whites of his eyes in the mirror. It was the autumn term, and, as the days diminished, so did Eliot’s patience. Something about the darkness that cloaked their room, something about the cold that set in and the condensation that blinded the windows, made the situation even more claustrophobic. By the time December came, Eliot despised even the sound of the boy’s footsteps, cursed the obnoxious way he cleared his throat.

  A cruel joke, now, that they were sharing a room for years. Those grim weeks of annoyance and passive aggression had been a brief primer for eternity. Instead of Ara’s face, he’d wake up to Jesse’s. Eliot shuddered as he headed down the bridge. Once again he reminded himself that it wasn’t Jesse’s fault. But Eliot could not help but remember that, less than four hours after Ara died, Jesse had leapt into the light and volunteered for her place, like a vulture descending on a corpse. He hated him for that.

  The boys were on the lower deck, competing on the simulator. Jesse sat in the mock commander’s chair in the centre of the room, and Eliot could see that his eyes were narrowed behind virtual-reality goggles, watching the controller with white-knuckled concentration. Harry leant over the edge of it as if he was watching a football game, and when Eliot entered the room with his camera they both groaned loudly.

  ‘Move out of the way,’ Harry shouted, swatting at Eliot’s thigh but missing.

  ‘I need to get one last interview,’ Eliot said. But Jesse didn’t reply.

  Of the many games banked on the ship’s computer, this was their favourite. It was an adventure game that involved traversing some artist’s schizophrenic dream of the galaxy, where cosmic background radiation shimmered like television static against an aubergine sky. Every now and then, a star burst into brilliant light, filling the screen with silver, red and gold. At each level, the computer taught the gamer new skills, which they had to manipulate and alter in the following levels. Jesse was in the middle of crash-landing on an alien planet. His craft had sustained damage and he didn’t have much time, according to the dashboard. Jesse collided with the stratosphere at the wrong angle, like a belly-flopping diver. So badly that Eliot winced. Jesse swore as the screen lit up and the hull of the ship began to flake away like crepe paper, flayed by the friction of the planet’s atmosphere. A virtual alien on that planet might look up and see a shooting star for a few brief moments as Jesse set fire to the sky.

  Harry clapped slowly, laughter on his lips. Jesse’s measly score appeared on screen.

  ‘I’ll show you how it’s done,’ Harry said, climbing out of his seat to grab the controller. Jesse pulled off his VR goggles and rubbed his eyes, the shame boiling in his cheeks.

  Eliot suddenly remembered his purpose. ‘I need an interview,’ he said, nodding at Jesse.

  ‘Right, right,’ Jesse agreed. ‘Wait, isn’t Poppy supposed to be doing this?’

  ‘She has a headache,’ Eliot said.

  ‘Sure.’ Harry rolled his eyes. ‘Anyway, can’t you see that we’re busy.’

  ‘This is our job,’ Eliot snapped at them, already tired, his own headache coming on like a slow drumbeat behind his skull. ‘We can’t all be commander-in-training.’

  Harry’s mouth curled into a sneer. ‘I guess.’ His eyes rolled down to the little pin with bronze wings attached to the side of his overalls.

  ‘You know,’ Eliot said, massaging his temples, ‘guess whose photographs will make it into the history books? When we get to Terra-Two, who will capture that moment for the world?’

  ‘And who will be in those photos?’ Harry retorted. ‘Some record history and others make history. No one remembers the cameraman.’

  ‘Okay . . .’ perhaps Jesse could tell that Eliot’s patience was running thin, ‘let’s do it.’

  As Eliot switched on the camera, Harry dropped the conversation and settled onto another game.

  ‘The questions are the same as the ones I’ve been asking everyone. How do you feel about the mission? Have you been settling in? What have the past two weeks been like for you? That sort of thing.’

  ‘Right.’ Jesse’s eyes rolled up as he thought for a moment. ‘To be honest, it’s a bit of a challenge. I’m from the backup crew and so I didn’t get quite the same training as the prime crew. So, a lot of things are still new to me. But, you know, it’s great to be here. Sometimes I wake up in the night an
d forget and then remember . . .’ Jesse glanced at the game Harry was playing on the screen. He was already through the first level. Harry was always winning. He flew through the easier levels with a practised ease, dodging and diving past radiant formations without a sideways glance at the star chart. It was as if he could navigate the universe by heart. Even Eliot abandoned the conversation for a few minutes to watch Harry’s fingers fly across the controls, his eyes triumphant behind sheets of reflected light. He was exactly as good as he thought he was. Able to preserve his ship and crew as he soared through lightyears of imagined space. Eliot could tell that it stung Jesse a little to watch, nightly, as his rival soared unvanquished past all the others, racking up higher and higher scores every night. ‘He’s in a different league,’ Jesse muttered to Eliot, his eyes fixed on the screen.

  ‘So,’ Jesse said, turning back to the camera, ‘I remind myself to be grateful every day. I’m on a real adventure, even if the day-to-day life of being on a ship is not always thrilling. I still feel like one of the luckiest people in our solar system.’

  Eliot cringed.

  In the background, Harry swore loudly. They both turned.

  ‘Watch it,’ Eliot said, pausing the recording. ‘You can’t swear. This will be broadcast all over the world. Schoolchildren are watching this. Jesse, can you repeat what you said?’

  But Jesse was again distracted, watching as Harry’s small vessel came into contact with a space station. Harry was tasked with executing the complicated set of manoeuvres required to dock with its port. It was moments like this when Eliot appreciated the graphics, the elaborate detail of the imaginary station circling a phantom moon. Eliot could tell from the beads of sweat on Harry’s forehead that he was struggling.