by Temi Oh
Igor was holding a device shaped like an egg.
‘It’s an Albatross,’ Eliot explained to Astrid as she ran her finger quizzically along the upturned base of it. ‘One of the most powerful cameras in the world. If we flew this thing over London Bridge we’d probably be able to count all the greys on every head.’
‘That’s right,’ Igor agreed.
‘NASA were using one for a long-range reconnaissance mission. To retrieve high-resolution pictures and geological data of Terra-Two.’
‘Today, they broadcast their findings on global television,’ Igor said, and Astrid gasped with excitement. ‘You want to see?’
‘Please,’ Astrid said, breathless. Igor tapped some buttons on his keyboard, opened up windows and then expanded one into a full-screen video.
Astrid watched open-mouthed as the pictures unfolded on the screen. The room filled with the blue light of cresting waves exploding into white foam on alien shores. The bright reflections of two suns shimmered like silver coins off the surface of the water, one huge and one small.
‘Look at this.’ Igor paused the video as the aerial camera swooped over the ocean. He used his mouse to zoom into the mottled navy pattern that haloed a small island. As the picture resolved, Astrid saw what he was pointing to. A strange chalk-coloured skeleton just visible under the pale water. ‘Calcium-carbonate,’ Igor said. ‘The main compound in pearls, snail shells, egg-shells and—’
‘Coral reefs.’ Astrid finished the sentence for him, touching the screen. ‘They’re real.’
‘That’s right,’ Igor said. ‘Who would have thought?’
Astrid laughed. Terra-Two was beautiful and everything, every single thing was just the way that she had imagined.
That night was another of her Terra dreams. Astrid awoke mistaking the hum and sigh of the ship for the rhythmic lapping of water. She could feel it, the feather softness of the surf, the way it slid up her thighs and kissed her face. Only it was the rumpled peach cotton of her duvet covers, and when she’d rubbed her eyes and sat up, her mattress was rocking against ivory shores.
She woke up early for the rest of the week. And every time she did, she would climb out of bed, and type ‘New Creationism’ into her tablet search engine.
HARRY
14.07.12
HARRY BELLGRAVE WASN’T IN space. He was sprinting through a forest he had never seen. The vegetation was so thick underfoot that he was forced to edge closer and closer to the river. The water was like glass. Every now and then he caught sight of a fish, the sun momentarily igniting its scales red or gold or green before it slipped again into shadow.
He was glad to be outside, to catch glimpses of the sun rising through the foliage, to watch as water sloshed across the coloured rocks on the bank, and how they glittered and skittered over each other as they were drawn back into the river. It looked as if the ground was crumbling beneath his feet.
Sometimes, moss-covered branches would fly into his field of vision, as if to whack him across the face, but he would ghost through them unharmed. That was one of the problems with the simulation. He could see things but he couldn’t feel the morning sun on his shins or the sharp wet rocks at his heels. These limitations stopped him from ever truly escaping the bounds of the games room.
Presently, the trees gave way and the river bulged sideways. Harry barely had time to stop running before the ground fell away and he was standing on the edge of a sheer cliff-face. River water sluiced over the side and crashed down into the glistening pools below, sending a foamy spray up into the trees.
He saw, then, how high he had climbed. Golden shafts of sunlight burst through the granite peaks of surrounding mountains. From his vantage point he felt as if he could grab the half-faced moons in the sky.
Below, a dozen waterfalls converged in misty pools or disappeared into the foliage. He could see all the way out across the bleach-green lagoon and untilled fields to the ocean, which was stained with pre-dawn pink. Goosebumps prickled up his arms. All around, the unblemished, unpeopled earth beckoned. That was where the footage ended.
It had been Eliot’s idea to connect the footage from the five Albatross cameras up to the simulator. So that when the crew were running on the treadmill, it was projected before them.
Pulling off his goggles, Harry jumped off the treadmill. His thighs and arms were glistening with sweat and he was still breathing hard from the workout. He took off his shirt and slumped down on the floor, his lips salty and wet.
If he were still at Dalton, he would not be training alone. He would be tearing through the school grounds with his friends, feet battering the field, their laughter misting on the morning air as they raced to beat each other’s speed. Life at Dalton had been as exciting as a war, and he missed it. He’d thought more of them would make it, the boys he called friends, but when they’d all been streamed into command school he knew that only one of them would be picked for the Beta. There could only be one commander-in-training.
After two months on the Damocles, Harry’s battle was against boredom. The constant pain of it. So he worked to keep his mind on his job, on the simulation, on the game.
In the silence, he heard someone coming. A soft tread. He hoped for a moment it might be Poppy, but instead it was Astrid who appeared in the doorway. She was still in her nightdress, the skin on her cheeks creased from the rumples in her pillow.
‘Oh, it’s you.’ She sounded disappointed.
‘Did you want to use the treadmill?’ Harry asked. ‘I’m almost finished.’
‘No . . . actually I wanted to look at . . .’ Her eyes found the footage of Terra-Two, frozen on the screen, and her focus drifted for a moment. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’
Harry shrugged. ‘You came down here just to look at it?’
Astrid glanced at him, then lowered her gaze in embarrassment. ‘You’ll laugh at me.’ She said it more to herself than to him. Harry was silent, still catching his breath from the run. ‘Everyone thinks that Tessa Dalton discovered Terra-Two by accident.’
‘Through calculation,’ Harry corrected. They had all learned about it in their astronomy classes. She’d noticed the microdistortion the planet had on the gravity of the primary star, and with the most powerful telescopes of her time she had seen the slight dimming of light that indicates the presence of a planet.
‘I know. But the fact was, she had been dreaming about it all her life. Another planet with two suns and two moons and not a soul on it. Terra lit up her sleep at night, she painted pictures of it. So by the time she made the discovery it didn’t feel like a happy accident. It felt like a homecoming.’
‘Yeah,’ said Harry. ‘There’s a whole lot of mythology surrounding the discovery of Terra-Two. Some people even think she was a prophet.’ Astrid’s wide-eyed gaze irritated him.
‘I think I do,’ she said. ‘How else would you explain it? She spends her whole life writing about Terra, claiming it’s habitable when they didn’t have the technology to know that then. Claiming there’s life somewhere else in the universe and years later we find that everything she said was correct. How do you explain that?’
‘I don’t know.’ Harry sighed. He hadn’t had breakfast yet and his blood sugar was low. ‘I think if you’re crazy – and she actually was sent to an asylum – you find what you’re looking for.’ Astrid’s face fell. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘she wasn’t right about everything. Have you read her papers? She says that Terra is like the Garden of Eden or something.’ Astrid was still staring at him in wounded disbelief. ‘Astrid? You know that’s just some New Creationist crap. That there are some people on this ship chosen by God who will make it to Terra. You can’t honestly believe it.’
‘I don’t know why I thought I could tell you anything,’ Astrid hissed, her face growing dark with fury.
‘Yeah,’ Harry said. ‘Why did you tell me? You know I don’t believe in any of that stuff.’
‘I don’t know. I came downstairs and you were here. I just wan
ted to talk to someone. Anyone.’
‘To tell someone that you’re part of some cult now? Because I think you should probably keep that stuff to yourself.’
‘I dream about it too.’ She waved a hand at the frozen projection of Terra-Two, which was casting a dull light on the side of her face. ‘Every single night.’ She stepped back. ‘For months I’ve been dreaming about the beach and the trees and the types of birds that land on them without knowing what it was. Then this footage from the cameras arrives, and it’s exactly the same as my dreams.’ Her voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘I know how it sounds, okay. But I also know how the sand bakes under the suns so at midday it’s too hot to walk on. The bittersweet fruits that grow in the forest: there’s one that’s bright red and hangs low on the trees. It’s the size and shape of a human heart. Tough as a mango but when you bite . . .’ Astrid closed her eyes for a half-second, her chest rising in silent rapture. ‘Juice bursts out, sweet and thick as blood that dries black in the sun. On the footage. You can see it on the footage – the fruits, just in the corner and just for half a frame, but they’re there. And the reefs, Harry. Don’t you remember, a couple of weeks ago in Cai’s lesson, I said that I was sure there were reefs. And now there’s evidence.’
‘I don’t know what that proves.’ Harry wondered if Astrid’s delusion was something he should mention to Commander Sheppard.
‘That I’m not making this up.’ Her voice was raised now, her cheeks flushed again.
Harry was still staring at her in amused scepticism. Astrid exhaled in fury and pushed him aside, striding towards the door.
‘Fine then,’ she said. ‘Ignore me.’ Her voice echoed down the corridor.
Harry pulled his goggles back on and returned to the simulation. He was running again on the treadmill, though on a lower speed because – though he didn’t consciously admit it – he was looking for something. He replayed the footage from the beginning, running through the forest, ankles rustling through the thick undergrowth. Most of the trees were tall, letting only slivers of light down into the forest floor. Harry ran past the ancient trees that lined the edges of the river, their roots bulging up from the soil, then he noted something. He paused the simulation, rewound, zoomed in. Blood-red fruit, the size and shape of a human heart.
POPPY
2005
LATER, THEY WOULD TELL her that sadness was a sickness. Poppy suspected that she’d caught it from her mother. She imagined that it had passed like poison from her breast milk, or had been woven into her genes from conception. Perhaps it filled the air in their flat like a miasma, and drove everyone away, all the boyfriends Poppy’s mother invited into their home.
Poppy’s best memories were from those moments in between the boyfriends and the bouts of her mother’s teary-eyed self-loathing and depression. When they would watch Fresh Prince together while eating butter sandwiches and stuffing the crusts down the side of the sofa. Or staying up all night toasting marshmallows on the stove, and turning unpaid bills into origami boats that they sent racing across the bathtub.
The boyfriend who stayed the longest was Stephen. Stephen was one of those men who never stopped looking like a teenager. His facial hair still grew in patches, he was tall and thin and almost imperceptibly out of proportion. Everything he did was ironic, like the way he wore Reebok jumpers and dungarees. He was an artist, apparently. Poppy caught a glimpse of his art one afternoon when they were driving home in his shabby Ford and the wheels juddered as if they’d hit a speed bump. Poppy’s mother took in a sharp breath.
‘What?’ Poppy asked. They’d stopped.
‘I think you’ve run something over, Steve,’ her mother said, her face pale. Poppy imagined a tiny person curled up under their car.
‘Probably just a fox,’ he said.
‘Go have a look.’
‘What do you want me to do, bury the thing?’
‘Steve . . .’
He climbed out of the car.
Poppy scrambled after him, slamming the door shut behind her. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
It was only a dead bird. She saw it when she walked around to the front. Stephen had crushed its little bones under the wheel of the car and he stood staring at the carcass with wide, curious eyes, as if he could see colours in it that she couldn’t.
‘It looks like fireworks,’ he said quietly. Poppy tried to pretend that she didn’t know what he was talking about: the way the blood sprayed the dusty tarmac, bits of feather, flesh and indistinguishable strands of sinew bloomed on the road.
‘It’s the same colour as your hair,’ he said, then knelt down and pressed a thumb into the blood before touching her forehead, as if it was Ash Wednesday. Poppy felt something grow in her stomach. She felt proud and special.
‘Adieu pour toujours,’ she said. She’d been reading Bonjour Tristesse in the car.
Stephen pulled a camera out of his pocket to take a picture.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, the spell suddenly broken.
He looked at her and spoke slowly. ‘You’re right, of course, a picture won’t do it. I need to take it with me. I need the real thing, right?’
‘For what?’
‘For art,’ he said.
Which began their life on the road. Stephen was so captivated by his new idea – driving up and down high roads in search of roadkill – that Poppy’s mother didn’t attempt to stop him. Instead, they all came along. They made a family outing of it, every Saturday waking up early to pile into the increasingly foul-smelling car and drive up and down the roads until the sun slipped off the horizon. Poppy downloaded language podcasts, and mouthed the words silently at the window – Il mio nome è Poppy, Come ti chiami? Mi annoio. Annoiato. Annoiato – looking at the open fields, the power lines and houses with the adolescent certainty that something immensely fun was happening elsewhere.
She could hear Stephen and her mother arguing some nights, through the wall beside her bed. She’d bury her face into her pillow and fight to sleep.
One night she opened her eyes and saw a small flickering light in the darkness. ‘No, don’t move,’ said the shadow at the end of her bed. He was holding up a video camera.
‘What are you doing?’ Poppy asked, her voice still thick with sleep.
‘It’s got to be natural.’
He’d come most nights after that. Poppy didn’t always know because it was always after she was asleep, although sometimes she would wake from a dream and see the flashing light of the camera at the foot of her bed. The most he would ever do was raise a finger to his lips to shh her, and in the morning he would be gone.
When she was older and she thought about it an uneasy feeling would settle in the pit of her stomach. She could never figure out why she’d never simply locked her door.
THE ARGUMENTS ESCALATED, AND when the house wasn’t filled with her mother’s stony silence, she and Stephen were screaming at each other across the kitchen table, smashing glasses no one swept up, so they would all have to tiptoe around the debris for a week. Poppy had become an expert at using tweezers to pull sharp little splinters from the balls of her feet.
One day, from the living room, Poppy heard her mother call him ‘a shit artist’ and the shouting stopped.
She listened out for a little while but then she heard the door click open and the sound of a car horn outside. Another few moments of stillness before she pressed mute on the remote and listened for the growl of the engine revving up.
‘Poppy,’ a voice called, and she stiffened. ‘Poppy!’
‘I’m coming.’
It was Stephen’s shout from the open door of the purring car. Poppy was still in her pyjamas but she slipped into a pair of old slippers and ran outside.
Stephen and her mother were sitting in the front, her mother’s face wet with tears. ‘Get in,’ he said. Poppy bit her lip in hesitation, but Stephen was starting up the car and the wheels were already beginning to push off the tarmac when Poppy jumped in and slammed the door
behind her.
The car accelerated so quickly she was thrown back against her seat. ‘What are you doing?’ her mother gasped. They rounded a sharp bend in the road and Poppy was thrown against the window. ‘Put on your seatbelt,’ her mother shouted. ‘Steve, what are you doing? Stop the car. Stop the car.’
‘You think you know about art?’ he roared, pushing on the accelerator. The car flew over a speed bump, almost knocking them out of their seats and causing Poppy’s spine to slam back down again. ‘You don’t know a thing about art.’
Another speed bump and, though she’d braced herself, it tore a cry of terror from her as she lifted off the seat.
When they turned the next corner they narrowly missed another car, which swerved past, horn blaring. Poppy felt the air evaporate from her throat.
‘You’re driving like a madman, Ste—Watch out!’ They’d driven right off the road, juddered up onto the pavement and burst through the picket fence surrounding the common. Stephen was charging towards the pond and, for a horrifying moment, Poppy thought they were heading right into the cold water, but he turned them around at the last second with a shout of delight and trundled over the grass.
The car accelerated again, heading for a group of ducks, and both Poppy and her mother screamed as something rolled under the tyres. Feathers flew up by the window and the air filled with the squeal of birds, the crunch of branches and bone. ‘Stephen!’ Poppy’s mother shoved his hands off the steering wheel and Poppy squeezed her eyes shut as the car lurched back towards the pond. They were going to plunge in, she was sure of it, but she was too scared to unbuckle her seatbelt.
Then, she felt the car slow under her and come to a sudden stop. Scrambling to open the door, Poppy made it out just in time to throw up on the grass.
When she finished and wiped the side of her mouth, she was surprised to find that she was crying. Heat spread across her face as more sobs came and she did nothing to wipe them away. She walked away from the car for a while, sat on the bench overlooking the scummy pond.