Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

by Temi Oh

  ‘Can you repeat what you said?’ he asked Jesse.

  ‘Sure,’ but Jesse turned again at a sound from the simulator, and the screen filled with light. Harry had guessed the angle of approach wrong and lost control of his shuttle, which crashed into a wing of the space station. On the screen, it shattered like glass, one whole truss snapping off, exploding in incandescent shards that accelerated in all directions. With a groan of failing machines, the game was over. Harry let out a huff of frustration, but Jesse keeled over in hysterical laughter.

  ‘I’d like to see you do better,’ Harry said. He tossed the controller at the wall and stormed out.

  In the instant the door closed behind him all hilarity evaporated, and Jesse eyed the simulator screen warily. Perhaps remembering that Harry was going to be their commander one day. ‘I guess, it’s not just a game, though,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Eliot said. ‘Not to him, I don’t think.’

  ‘Not to me either,’ Jesse said, gritting his teeth.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, ELIOT re-watched the recording he had made on his laptop. He examined the scene carefully, Jesse’s face in the foreground, with his eyes fixed on the projector screen. Harry, in the distance, holding the controller. And there, in the window, Eliot thought that he could see something. Ara’s face, staring at him through the glass, her lips black, eyes yellow and half-open. Even then, when he gazed at it on his computer, his heart kicked in his chest and he was unable to breathe for a moment.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Jesse asked the screen.

  ‘Nothing,’ came video-Eliot’s voice from behind the camera.

  Eliot paused the recording, rubbed his eyes and pressed play. But staring at Ara’s face was like staring at a fluorescent light. Even when he closed his eyes, the shadow of it stained his retina. ‘Ara,’ he said, touching the screen.

  Jesse smiled from behind it. ‘Hey—’ he laughed nervously. ‘You looked for a second like—’ Eliot pressed the rewind button. But this time, Ara’s face had vanished from the window. He rubbed his eyes again. It had just been his own startled reflection.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Jesse asked in the video.

  ‘Nothing,’ video-Eliot had lied.

  ‘Hey,’ Jesse said, smiling at the camera, ‘you looked for a second like you’d seen a ghost.’

  POPPY

  05.06.12

  THE DAY THE EARTH disappeared, Poppy had been reading. One of the few novels she had brought with her: the first Harry Potter book, a scrappy second-hand copy she’d been sent by her father. He’d found a Latin edition, Harrius Potter et Philosophi lapis, in an Oxfam bookshop. This dog-eared paperback with its coffee-stained cover was a delight to read, because it reminded her of home, of lying on her back on the carpet, feet pressed up against the caging on the radiator, transported again and again away from the tedium of her own life and down the dim halls of that dead language. Latin had not been her first, but it was her favourite. Poppy liked to believe that simply by thinking in it, she was breathing life into it. Non est ad astra mollis e terris via, as she had thought on the shuttle. There is no easy way from earth to the stars. She was like a linguistic necromancer. She might not be a medic or a robotics genius, she might not have as much to bring to Terra-Two as her clever friends, but Poppy liked to console herself with the fact that she could bring this, she could bring Japanese and German, she could teach Latin to colonist children and resurrect it.

  People often asked Poppy whether or not the languages ever became ‘mixed up’ inside her head, like a jumbled salad of half-formed tongues, muddled masculine and feminine, pronouns and present perfect, alif and alpha. Which was a question that Poppy always found difficult to answer because, in her head, sometimes the words did run together. She’d begin a thought in english and then find the perfect untranslatable word for it in French. Dépaysement. La douleur exquise.

  How had it started? Poppy had heard about driven parents who hired nannies to teach their children four different languages, and there had been a few students at Dalton whose mothers had glamorous international jobs that required spending their summers in Myanmar, finishing off high school in Cape Town, a sabbatical in Lesotho; children who learned the languages as a matter of necessity.

  Poppy had not been one of them. She’d come of age on a council estate in Liverpool, but within those concrete walls she had heard dozens of languages. Their Polish neighbours had four blond boys they’d sometimes ask Poppy’s mother to babysit. One floor down lived Amira, the easily frightened Ethiopian woman whose clothes Poppy had offered to wash when her machine broke. In 9a lived the three-generation Pakistani family, Mr and Mrs Bhatia with their clever daughters and grandchildren.

  One day, Poppy returned from school to find that her mother had disappeared. Absconded for a week to Ibiza with a boyfriend who disliked children. She’d pinned a pink fifty-pound note to the noticeboard by the front door and the phone number of her boyfriend’s sister.

  Tia, the willowy Kenyan woman who lived upstairs, horrified that her neighbour had left her nine-year-old daughter alone for so long, offered to let Poppy stay for the week. Poppy slept on the sofa. But Tia’s young daughters did not like their new house guest; they called her ‘muzungu’ and picked at her hair as if it had fleas in it.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Poppy had asked.

  Tia had shrugged. ‘It just means “white person”,’ she’d said with a dismissive wave, only the way that they said it, it sounded like an insult. So Poppy had worked hard that week to learn a few phrases in Swahili – hujambo, asante sana, lugha moja haitoshi. And the girls had accepted her words like a peace offering. Gave her others to add to her collection. Soon, the mood in the house changed, as if Poppy had crossed a threshold into their family, and by the end of the week they were singing raucously to Swahili songs, clapping their hands and braiding each other’s hair.

  By the time Poppy’s mother returned, suntanned and exhausted, Poppy had realized that she had travelled somewhere too. It occurred to her, then, that there was a cure for her loneliness, that perhaps language had been the only barrier all along between herself and Amira, or the Bhatias and their blushing children. Six months later, she returned home from school and bumped into one of Tia’s daughters, who had showed her the friendship bracelet she’d woven for her out of loom bands and said, ‘Ninakupenda.’ I love you.

  That was how it began for Poppy. She found that she had a knack for languages, that her tongue bent easily into unfamiliar shapes, that learning each new language felt like furnishing the mansion of her mind with new rooms through which she could wander. Soon she was asking her mother for language courses for Christmas, finding the cheapest ones she could afford, online lessons, podcasts. She requested Harry Potter in Japanese, Polish, Swahili. And the more she learned, she found, the more her mind was able to acquire, as if it was some impossible well that could never be filled. At first, Poppy used languages to help her to escape her mother’s neglect, but later, she discovered with delight that the languages could help her to escape her whole insipid life.

  She had probably been given an interview at Dalton because one local newspaper had named her the city’s youngest ‘hyperpolyglot’. Poppy had always suspected that something about a mind that could grasp the counter-intuitive logic of another language appealed to the directors of the space programme. It meant that Poppy had easily picked up computer coding, learned the syntax and semantics to express the algorithms.

  ‘What are you reading?’ Jesse asked, breaking into her reverie as he climbed down the ladder and squinted at the title. ‘Is that Harry Potter?’

  ‘Yep.’ Poppy didn’t look up from the dog-eared pages.

  ‘In Italian?’

  ‘In Latin.’

  ‘Ha.’ Jesse smiled. ‘There’s a version in Latin?’

  ‘That’s right. Only the first two books though. I’ve heard there’s a version in Ancient Greek as well. It’s the longest Ancient Greek text written since AD 3.’

  �
�Children’s books in Ancient Greek – pretentious much?’ Harry said from across the room.

  ‘Says the man playing chess.’ Astrid rolled her eyes.

  They’d gathered, as they often did after dinner, in the crew module, which after three weeks on the Damocles had taken on the same chaotic energy as their sixth-form common room. It was filled with the flotsam and jetsam of their confined lives. Abandoned board games, balled-up uniforms socks and UKSA-issued vests, joint property that no one felt strongly enough to lay claim to. That evening, Astrid was plaiting Juno’s hair into cornrows at one end of the room, Juno cross-legged on the floor, resting a cheek on her sister’s knees. Harry and Eliot were engaged in a hectic game of chess that involved moving their pieces and then hammering the timer down after each turn.

  ‘Nice to see someone reading a real book,’ Jesse said.

  ‘What do you mean “real book”?’ Juno asked, unable to turn her head as Astrid slid the oiled teeth of a comb into a tuft of her hair. ‘Like paper and glue?’

  ‘Yeah. Instead of the computer screens and tablets we always use. I know weight restrictions mean we can’t bring our whole personal library up here, but nothing compares, you know, to the smell of the paper, and a book doesn’t need batteries.’

  Poppy flipped to the next page.

  ‘It’s not about paper and ink,’ Juno said. ‘What’s important is data. For the next generation. When we get to Terra what will happen to all our history, all our science? If our technology dies and that’s where all our information is recorded, will it take them another millennium to remember that bacteria causes disease? What happens to Sophocles and Sylvia Plath? It only takes a generation to lose all that. It’s all information, stored in terabytes of data in our hard drives. Backed up, incorporeal.’

  ‘It’s not just about preserving the past, though,’ Astrid said. ‘We’ll discover new things. Our children will write their own literature, new philosophies.’

  Poppy reached the end of the chapter and stood up. Drawn, as she often was, towards the window. Up until this point in the journey she could cover Earth with a thumb pressed against the glass, watch as it diminished to the size of a blue star. But, that evening, Earth had disappeared altogether. She examined the other windows, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, wished it back into being.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Astrid noticed her agitation.

  ‘Have you seen it?’ She was surprised to find that her stomach was suddenly tight as a fist inside her.

  ‘What?’ Astrid blinked in confusion.

  ‘Home,’ Poppy said. ‘It’s gone.’ Eliot and Harry looked up from the chequered board.

  Astrid got up off the sofa. She pressed her face to the window in silence, then said, ‘So it is’, her voice light with wonder.

  ‘Don’t be melodramatic,’ Eliot said, without looking up. ‘It’s not “gone”. Where would it go? It just looks like a star.’ He glanced up at them then sighed, walking over to the glass wall and beckoning them over. ‘Look over there—’ he pressed his finger against it. ‘Earth looks just like a star. A big star, and right next to it – there, can you see? – the moon. It’s just smaller. In a day or two you’ll need a telescope to see it.’

  A wide smile spread across Astrid’s face. ‘It’s beginning,’ she said, and walked back to the sofa.

  ‘What is?’ Harry looked a little uneasy, though he’d returned to his game. Juno returned to her position under her sister’s comb.

  ‘Can you feel it in here?’ Poppy asked them, touching her stomach. ‘Like spacesickness . . . ?’

  Astrid shook her head. ‘The best part of the journey,’ she said. ‘Everything’s ahead of us.’

  Something about Astrid’s words and the glee with which she delivered them made Poppy feel ill, an elevator-drop panic that she had been cast adrift in this nothingness, continually accelerating away from sky and sea and solid ground. She had to run back into the bedroom before her mouth dropped open with a cry of fear and despair in front of the others.

  Sobs tore out of her, and with them everything she had been hiding for weeks, months. Her private doubts about the mission, her loneliness, her grief for home and for Ara and everything she had left behind. Then other things too, the tumult of the pre-launch days compared to the lull of space, her boredom, her impotence and wriggling insecurity. Her sobs came out in huge quaking gasps and even as they did she felt the indulgent satisfaction of them. All those years in Dalton it hadn’t been okay to cry, but today . . .

  Est quaedam flere voluptas. There was a certain pleasure in weeping.

  Poppy only looked up a little while later, when she heard the sound of the door clicking open. She drew a hand across one eye, wiping away just enough of the tears to see Harry’s outline in the light.

  He observed her silently for a moment, with an expression she couldn’t discern. ‘You look so ugly when you cry,’ he said.

  And she saw him for a moment, as she sometimes did, as just a little bit mean, his mouth twisted in a cruel sort of smile. But in the next moment he leant down and kissed her. She’d seen the shampoo that he used in his bathroom cubbyhole, an expensive brand. Sicilian lemon and tangerine. The smell was heady.

  ‘I feel it here too.’ He touched his stomach in the same place she had. ‘It hurts for me too.’

  ASTRID

  07.06.12

  ASTRID WAS SURPRISED WHEN Poppy did not turn up for their lesson on Thursday. Group sessions normally took place around the kitchen table, with the senior crew member taking them standing at the head. That afternoon it was Cai, and the room was still ripe with the smell of the rehydrated chicken soup they’d had for lunch.

  ‘There are five of you,’ Cai said, looking over all of their heads as if he was not certain.

  ‘Poppy says she’s sick,’ Juno said, flicking a sticky pea off the table. ‘Who was on cleaning duty this week?’

  ‘Sick with what?’ Harry asked, slamming his folder down in front of him.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Juno sighed. ‘She says she’s been having headaches.’

  ‘Well, she’s supposed to get permission from the commander to miss a group lesson. And she’ll have to catch up,’ Cai said, then looked down at his tablet. ‘We’re going to look at the article I sent you all from the Journal of Marine Science and Ecology—’

  ‘Oh,’ said Juno, tapping the correct page on her tablet. ‘I’ve read it already. I think. The one about conservation genetics and coral reefs?’ She saw Astrid straighten up at her words, her eyes alight with excitement.

  ‘The reefs on Terra-Two?’ she asked, and as she said it she could see them, the rainbow-coloured coral, wreathed in teal weeds. She clapped her hands together in excitement. ‘We’re finally going to learn about them.’ But Astrid was surprised to see that everyone was looking at her quizzically.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Harry asked. ‘What reefs?’

  ‘The coral reefs on Terra-Two,’ Astrid said. Eliot raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I’m not familiar with that,’ Cai said. ‘I don’t think we have much evidence of the marine life on Terra-Two. Now, can you please open that page?’ He turned to the whiteboard he’d wheeled from the corner. ‘Does this pen work? That’ll do. Right, now. Who can summarize negative frequency-dependent selection . . . ?’ Juno and Harry raised her hands.

  AS THE LESSON CONTINUED, the thought niggled at Astrid. She couldn’t remember anymore where she’d come by the notion of coral reefs on Terra-Two, or why she had such a clear image of them in her mind. During dinner that evening, both Commander Sheppard and Igor confirmed that they were not even sure that coral could survive, considering the high ocean temperatures on the planet.

  So, during her free time after dinner, Astrid accessed the Damocles’ online library on her laptop. She discovered quickly that Cai had been right and there was no evidence of reefs, but Astrid followed one link after another, opening tab after tab in an encyclopaedia deep-dive that led her to a few biographies of Tes
sa Dalton.

  Tessa Dalton had been the first person to dream of Terra-Two – although she lived and died in near obscurity. Astrid first heard the name in her second year in the programme, when a bronze statue of Tessa was erected in a red-brick quadrangle at Dalton Academy. The sculpture had been different in every way from the serene marble busts that overlooked the school assembly hall or the stern likenesses of the founders standing watch on the front lawn. A group of parents had complained when it was first donated to the school, because her naked body looked so lifelike. Tessa Dalton’s eyes were protuberant and pupil-less, turned skyward. It was not a flattering likeness: the wasted muscles in her thighs, the puckered scars on her forearms, deflated breasts hanging on the cage of her chest. Astrid came across a news article, dated the first of June, stating that the statue had disappeared.

  Astrid already knew that the Dalton estate was over 400 years old. The family owned acres of land north of the River Thames, and had, for centuries, made their fortune from property developments in affluent swathes of the city. During Astrid’s lifetime, they were most famous for the multinational venture capital conglomerate to which they gave their name. But she knew that their school had been named after James Dalton, a maverick nineteenth-century offshoot of their family who worked all his life as an astronomer. James Dalton had discovered that the sun’s second-closest star system – after Alpha Centauri – was a binary. Two stars orbiting like dumbbells around a common centre of mass. Twins, swapping places every century, eternally eclipsing each other.

  James’s only daughter, Tessa, devoted her life to watching the stars for signs of another planet. In space – as on Earth – Newton’s Third Law applies. When a star tugs on an orbiting planet, the planet tugs back. From where Astrid was on the ship, the Earth already looked like a blue star in the darkness, but once they reached the edge of the solar system it would blink out of existence. The sun would grow indistinguishable from all the other stars and the only way to tell that there was a little planet spinning in the blackness around it would be a slight wobble measured in the sun’s light.