by Temi Oh
In fact, the only time in his life that Harry had failed to practise had been a Saturday morning eighteen months before the launch, when the sky above his dormitory had filled with smoke. He’d emerged from the shower to find the grounds swarming with paramedics, the police evacuating all the students. Harry heard that his roommate, Jack Redcliffe, had crashed the academy’s Cessna 172. The cause, he later learned, was engine failure that, the coroner’s report claimed coldly, was due to ‘pilot error’.
Pilot error: words that had rattled through the bones in Harry’s head every day since then. It had not been the first time someone had died at Dalton, and it would not be the last. But Command School was closed for half a day, all flights grounded, and a few pupils were assigned a counsellor and sent home for the rest of the week to recover. Including Harry himself, against his will.
After the accident, Harry dreamt of losing control of the plane, and making a nosedive for the ground. The day after he returned home, he abandoned the hope of a good night’s sleep and headed down to the TV room. There he spotted his father’s head of blond and silver hair resting on the sofa. He was watching the fuzzy replay of the accident that had been looping all day on the news.
‘It’s a good thing it happened now, and not later,’ his father said, without turning around.
‘Why?’ Harry asked, glancing at Jack’s photo in the corner of the screen. The greasy red hair he was always shaking out of his eyes.
‘Engine failure after take-off: what would you have done?’ His father finally turned to him.
‘If it was immediately after take-off, I’d close the throttle, attain a recommended gliding speed, pick a landing path and concentrate on a good landing . . .’
‘He made a mistake,’ Harry’s father said, nodding at the television.
‘A common one,’ Harry said quietly. ‘I think he tried to turn back and land in the aerodrome. He panicked. Maybe he wasn’t thinking about the airspeed and load factor . . .’
‘You see, Harrison, that is what your training is for. To make these mistakes now, to weed out the less competent. Imagine if something like this had happened up there.’
HARRY BEAT JESSE ON the simulator. They raced in neighbouring ships, but Harry was far more skilled than Jesse and he ascended to the end of the level, laughing as he did so.
‘How often do you fly on this simulator?’ Harry asked. Jesse shrugged, tugging at the elastic on the back of his goggles, which had tangled in his long hair.
‘Like, every week,’ he said.
‘How many times a week?’
‘Once or twice,’ Jesse said. Harry raised an eyebrow.
There was not one thing that Harry admired about Jesse. At Dalton, Jesse had been part of the sub-class of indie kids, who sulked at the edges of the canteen and shunned team sports, as if physical exertion was somehow beneath them, not realizing that half the work of being an astronaut was physical, and that teamwork was essential. Harry had been surprised when Jesse had been sorted into the piloting stream, but unsurprised when he’d dropped out and switched to botany and hydroponics after a matter of days.
Harry had watched the video of Jesse volunteering to take Ara’s place, the fervour in his eyes. If it wasn’t impossible, Harry might have thought that perhaps Jesse had killed her, pushed her into the river himself, just so that he could seize her place on the team.
‘Why did you switch to hydroponics?’ Harry asked.
Jesse shrugged. ‘Seemed a better fit, I guess.’
‘Seemed easier?’
Jesse said nothing.
Harry knew the answer. Jesse was the kind of person who believed in ‘destiny’ and not hard work. It had taken Harry’s father ten years of practising chess for six hours a day to become a grandmaster, and Harry had taken to flying with the same devotion.
Harry motioned to the sensor and the screen went blank. He stood up and clapped Jesse on the shoulder. ‘Look, Jesse Solloway, I don’t know whose arm you twisted to get on this ship. But I know that you don’t belong here.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Really,’ Harry said. ‘You’re a lazy cheat, switching to hydro just because it’s easier. Trying to play the system. And then you convinced them to take you. Don’t think I haven’t seen you eyeballing me when I fly. It took years of practice to get where I am, so stick to planting seeds. Piloting is real work.’
ELIOT
01.07.12
WHEN ELIOT IMAGINED LIFE on Mars he pictured scientists crouched in modest hab-labs, ticking off the days until their return. Billionaires pouring money into developing zero-g retirement homes or polar ice-hockey rinks. Immigrant workers from nameless corporations drilling down into the dust until their bones grew thin and brittle. There wasn’t much on Mars, and no one went there unless they had to.
There had been a time when his grandparents were enchanted by the red planet. They pictured faces of Martians etched into the dust. People still spoke about the first manned Mars landing with a little shiver. Eliot forgot how many times he had seen the iconic black-and-white footage of the day the Soviets pushed their flag down into the rust-coloured soil, nine months before the British.
According to the history books, Igor Bovarin had been at the front end of that race. He had been one of the chief engineers whose work contributed to the VASIMR engine, the patented device that shortened the journey to Mars from around seven months to seven weeks. The joke that the USSR could make it to Mars and back before the US or the British left the launch pad was not entirely unfounded.
Igor rose to fame as the main pioneer of ion-propulsion technology. By the time Eliot was in secondary school his name slipped off anyone’s tongue when asked to name a famous engineer, and, although Igor was serving prolonged missions to Mars, his sights were already set on interstellar travel. The UK Space Agency recruited him to work on their Off-World Colonization Programme. Igor had been approaching retirement age by then, but the rumour was that the UKSA had offered the old man something he could not refuse.
Thanks to Igor’s invention, it took Eliot and his crew only forty-nine days to pass through Mars’ orbit, and he watched the planet grow wide in the window.
Eliot had taught himself the mechanics of ion propulsion. The engine on the Damocles used radio waves to tear the electrons off atoms of argon to give them a positive charge. Heating the gas up to 50,000°C, turned it into a substance known as plasma, the fourth state of matter. It gave Eliot a small thrill to know that plasma – the substance created inside nuclear fusion reactors, the stuff that suns were made of – was also being produced by the engine on their ship. A magnetic field directed the plasma out of the back of the rocket like an aerosol from a pressurized can.
Igor’s rocket provided them with enough thrust to accelerate constantly at less than a thousandth of a g. This had always seemed a small amount to Eliot, but it nevertheless meant that their speed was increasing all the time. It had taken them seven weeks to fly by Mars but, at the rate they were travelling, they were scheduled to reach Saturn in just over a year, even though it was much further away.
Terra-Two was three lightyears away, a figure that made interplanetary distances seem relatively measly. Eliot knew that, at their current acceleration, it would take the crew 150 years to reach Terra-Two, but Igor and his team had engineered the ship’s engine to swing by Saturn like a ribbon around a maypole, using the planet’s gravity to increase their speed by a factor of 100, enough to catapult the Damocles from their solar system and into interstellar space.
As the red planet loomed large in the window, Eliot began to wonder what it had been like for Commander Sheppard, Cai and Igor, who had served multiple missions on Mars. Eliot didn’t find it difficult to imagine Igor weathering a dust storm, his pellucid blue eyes shining behind his visor as he endured another season of sunless polar nights.
‘Do you think we’ll be able to see the hab-labs from here?’ Astrid asked when she entered the kitchen and joined Eliot by the window. The a
ir was bitter with the smell of coffee – Juno was behind them, scooping the black sludge of brewed grounds into the disposal unit.
‘Do you think we can see the what?’ Poppy asked, dusting crumbs off her overalls.
‘Not from here,’ Juno said. ‘With a telescope maybe.’ Mars was the size of a copper penny.
‘Do you ever wonder what it’s like down there?’ Eliot asked. Juno shook her head.
‘Like a desert,’ said Poppy. ‘That’s what Commander Sheppard says.’
‘Like a cold desert,’ said Juno. ‘Just you wait until we get to Jupiter. We’ll actually get close to it.’
Eliot could not help but smile as he imagined watching the gas giant from the window of the crew module. A late but exciting addition to their mission involved helping to deliver supplies to the US station orbiting above one of Jupiter’s moons. Eliot was looking forward to meeting up with the seasoned astronauts on station, but he was still curious about the surface of Mars. If he squinted he thought he could see it, pock-marked and terracotta. The dusting of ice at the poles – larger on the top than the bottom – suggested that it was winter, now, in the southern hemisphere.
‘Hey.’ Astrid turned to Eliot, rousing him from his reverie. ‘Igor says he has something to show you. On the engineering deck.’
Eliot’s ears pricked up with curiosity. ‘Really?’ he asked. ‘What?’
Astrid beamed. ‘Terra-Two,’ she said, and then rushed out of the room. Eliot hurried after her and down the ladder that led to the engineering deck.
In Eliot’s capacity as trainee engineer, he spent a lot of time with Igor on the windowless engineering deck, and it had quickly become one of his favourite places on the Damocles. When he walked, he could feel the ship’s heartbeat through the soles of his feet. What little light there was on the engineering deck came from the scrolling readouts off the monitors and the orange glow of hot filaments.
The deck reminded Eliot of his uncle’s studio. After his parents’ death, he had been sent to live with his father’s brother, a perilously thin autistic man who worked for a watchmaker in south Wales and let Eliot spend long hours in the studio with him as he built timepieces. Eliot traced his interest in engineering back to those days of flipping through user manuals, jiggling his leg on the rungs of a stool while CNC cutters buzzed in the background. He’d come to admire the machinery, the reliability of it, as he leaned over the desk as his uncle polished tiny cogs and screws. There was something impressive about the fine micro-mechanics of a wristwatch, small things, some no bigger than a two-pound coin, and yet inside was an entire whirring solar system built of golden shafts, steel springs and gearwheels. Each watch contained over 1,000 components, some barely visible to the naked eye.
That was how Eliot began with robotics. He turned his bedroom into a workshop, collecting what equipment he could from his uncle’s studio and, in the dead of night, building machines straight from his dreams. A robotic finger that could twang the strings of a guitar, a hand that high-fived; then more complex machines: a sunlight sensor attached to the railing on his curtains, so they flew open when the radius of the sun at the horizon was exactly sixteen arc minutes. He designed a head for a Terran rover that performed calculations – based on the viability of water, and the partial pressure of various gasses – and yielded the probability of finding life in that region. He’d called the programme the Liston Algorithm.
His uncle had been so impressed by it that he entered the work into an engineering competition run by Imperial College London. Eliot did not understand the exact chain of circumstances that led to his work landing on the desk of Igor Bovarin, but he still remembered the day that the legendary cosmonaut had called him up on the house phone. A week later, four men in suits arrived at the house and sat in the living room, which Eliot clearly remembered was flooded with white afternoon light, gulls arcing and wheeling through the window.
‘So, you’re Eliot Liston,’ they’d said. ‘How old are you?’
‘Six hundred and sixty-seven,’ Eliot had said. ‘Weeks. Twelve point eight years. Almost . . . thirteen.’ A low whistle of surprise from one of the men.
They could not believe that the work had come from someone so young. Surely, they appealed to his uncle, he’d had some help. At least with the more complicated calculations? But his uncle had insisted he’d done it alone. Then, Igor Bovarin, the man – the legend – at the far end of the room, brought out a pen and wrote an equation on a piece of paper. Handed it to Eliot. Eliot had solved it quickly with a little laugh. Another, harder this time. Then another, in a tense back and forth exchange that ended, forty minutes later, in applause from three of the men.
They told him then about Dalton. A school on the outskirts of London where he could meet other students like himself. Had he heard of it? Of course he had! They told him about the work he could do there, the freedom he would have on the engineering stream to work with others as brilliant as himself, to be properly challenged by the best professors in the world. And, most enticing of all, if he agreed to go, his machines would be built. ‘Even the wild ones?’ he asked. Even the code he’d already written with a basic harmonic theory for a robot that could improvise a guitar solo.
‘Eliot, those are the most important ones,’ Igor had said with a smile.
There were already supply vessels heading for Terra-Two with the pre-fabricated hab-labs and equipment. But, they’d told him, once they made landfall they would need a mind like his not only to repair and update the machines, but to invent new ones. Machines that could meet the environmental challenges they were bound to face, that could drill into the land for water, that could drive for months, collect data and broadcast back the coordinates of optimal settlement locations.
They bought the patent to the Liston Algorithm and told him to pack his things. Two weeks later he was at Dalton, working under Igor on the engineering stream. Years later, he was on a ship bound for Terra-Two.
ASTRID
01.07.12
THEY CALLED IT A ‘doomsday cult’, but the New Creationists were the opposite. Their leaders did not rally docile crowds to keep vigils for the end of the world. Their eyes were fixed on the skies, happily heralding the arrival of a new one. The new Earth, the second chance. And wasn’t that, really, what everyone believed?
After that night at the dinner table when Astrid first heard about their movement, she could not help herself. She watched all the videos she could find about them. Clips that had already garnered thousands of views in certain corners of the internet. Read comment threads and forums devoted to discussing Tessa Dalton, the unwitting founder and martyr of their movement. She’d been called out of obscurity like Mary, the mother of Jesus, like the Old Testament prophets, or the Magi who trekked across countries following portents they’d divined in the stars.
New Creationism was in perfect harmony with Astrid’s religious upbringing. In Sunday school, she’d been taught about the Garden of Eden. For a whole year of her life she could not help but imagine it: eternal life, milk and honey, God walking like a giant amongst the trees. She imagined the agony of being cast out. Tried to envision what kind of life Adam and Eve could eke out after that. Rebels, fools, they’d lost everything.
And so Astrid was converted to New Creationism. It happened all at once, like an earthquake, a momentous shift, the tectonic plates of her belief rearranged violently under her. It happened the day she saw Terra-Two.
She had followed Eliot down to the engineering deck to see the new images of the planet that had been uploaded by NASA.
Astrid had always found the engineering deck a little creepy. As the ship’s engineer, the person who spent the most time there was Igor Bovarin. His pencilled diagrams were draped across empty patches of wall and any careless step threatened to knock over a wobbling tower of his dog-eared manuals. Astrid spotted him emerging from the shadows between the machines so often that every darkened alcove seemed to mirror the hunch of his back. Every oil spill looked like
a footprint from his boots and the chug of the machines resembled his dry cough and heavy breathing.
‘Astrid said you wanted to see me?’ Eliot asked, stepping further into the gloom. Igor smiled, the light coming off his old lamp illuminating his face sodium-yellow and accentuating the lines in his liver-spotted skin. Astrid followed Eliot and ducked into the honey-coloured light of their little workstation. It smelt of oil and ink.
‘Astrid, Eliot,’ Igor said, their names still an exotic delight in his thick accent. ‘Sit. I have something to show you both.’
Astrid saw Eliot’s eyes fill with the kind of rapt attention he only ever paid the aging cosmonaut. It was no secret that Eliot idolized the man. Astrid had been present the first time Igor made a surprise appearance during a physics class at Dalton, and Eliot had been struck dumb with delight. So happy that he waited behind by the Bunsen burners for everybody to leave and then asked Igor to sign a battered copy of his biography, which Astrid knew Eliot kept under his desk for inspiration. It was no surprise that Eliot had been chosen to come under Igor’s tutelage. He was lucky to be learning everything Igor could teach him about engineering, physics and the ion engine in the two decades they had together, she thought.