Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

by Temi Oh

  Juno stood up.

  When she imagined life on Terra-Two she pictured unity. Their little colony working joyfully to tame the land, to set up a base. There would be no arguments about chores because everyone would work to ease the others’ burden. There would be no fighting, there would be no more of the juvenile competition that had spread amongst the boys. But that needed to begin now. They had to train themselves to work together now, not two decades from now.

  ‘We need to start again,’ she said. Eliot, who had been nodding to music on his headphones, looked up quizzically.

  ‘We’re supposed to make things better,’ she said, heading towards the ladder. ‘We’re supposed to build a beautiful new world. No violence. No arguing. No selfishness.’

  Juno rushed up to the kitchen and grabbed a bucket from the sink. She shovelled handfuls of ice into it from one of the storage units and then filled the rest with water. It was almost spilling over as she climbed back down to the crew module, her stomach burning with passion. ‘We need to do it right this time.’

  Juno stormed into the girls’ cabin and heaved the contents of the bucket onto Poppy.

  Poppy screamed, first a high shriek of shock and discomfort but then, as the burn of the cold set in and she wiped her eyes to see Juno’s stern face, a roar of fury.

  ‘You monster,’ she yelled, her eyes blazing. ‘This is why no one likes you.’

  ‘I don’t care who likes me, Poppy,’ Juno said calmly. ‘And now you have to get out of bed, at least to have a shower and wash your bedsheets. And when you get back into bed, I’ll do this again. And again until you clean out the disposal unit and catch up with your work.’

  Poppy peeled off her saturated duvet and wiped the wet hair from her eyes. Her pale thighs were covered in goosebumps and she started to shiver. ‘I won’t forgive you for this,’ she said, getting unsteadily to her feet.

  ‘Hey,’ Astrid said, from the corner of the room. ‘That was really harsh.’

  Juno turned to her sister, her brow knitted in fury. ‘Whose side are you on?’

  ‘No one’s,’ Astrid insisted, then glanced at Poppy’s dripping bedsheets. ‘She’s just sad.’

  Juno kicked the empty bucket to the opposite wall and shouted, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’

  POPPY

  21.09.12

  TWO DAYS LATER, POPPY was still reeling from the fight with Juno. Her nerves still zinged with rage whenever she heard Juno’s clipped voice through the corridors of the ship. It had escalated, turned into a screaming match, Poppy’s heart still pounding from the shock of the cold and the other girl’s rage. She’d said every vicious thing she could think up, slinging curses and hurts at Juno, but her words had seemed to glance off her. Juno had simply stared back, her eyes so narrow they were nothing but darkness. She’d fired insults at Poppy like well-aimed darts, right into her ribs. Juno had always had a way with words and every blow stung. Even two days later, Juno’s accusations tormented Poppy. She had been forced to cede the battle, to leave the bed and catch up on the chores she had missed, as well as turn up for dinner promptly, choking down every bite of food she had no stomach for. Juno oversaw each task, mentally ticking off debts in her head: the dusty corners, unchanged filters, broken lightbulbs and the filthy disposal unit. Poppy had spent the time since the fight tending to them all.

  By the time she was finished scrubbing the grease-blackened tiles by the side of the stove, she was full of hate and in need of a shower.

  She entered the bathroom. Taking a shower on the Damocles was problematic. When the water didn’t surge out boiling hot, it was icy cold and, no matter how many knobs Poppy twisted, she could never seem to get the balance right. Climbing out of her clothes, she switched it on and reached a hand out to test it. The water spattered out with a hiss, then roared to full pressure, searing the skin on her forearm. She fought the urge to tug it out of the steaming jet and instead let the pain grow more intense, the stab of the burn radiating to her elbow.

  It was a relief to feel something. This pain was something. Her anger with Juno was something. Better, she had to admit, than the hollowed-out numbness that had ached inside her for months.

  ‘Pops?’ came a voice.

  She started, and snatched her arm out of the water. Steam curled off it, and the skin flamed red.

  Someone was banging on the door. ‘Let me in.’

  Picking up the towel with her nametag on it, Poppy covered her nakedness and opened the door.

  Harry was standing on the threshold, grinning. ‘Hey, dirty girl. Figured you were taking a shower. Mind if I join you?’ He entered and closed the door behind him before Poppy replied.

  ‘You did a good job out there,’ he said. Poppy shrugged, looking down at her black fingernails. She knew what Harry wanted before he asked, and she dropped her towel and tried to smile, hoping it would feel good, like holding her hand under the hot water felt good.

  Harry had been Poppy’s first. It happened only once before the launch, during a club night in east London called ‘How does it feel to be loved?’ The Smashing Pumpkins, The Kings of Convenience and, predominantly, The Smiths played on the loudspeakers. Clever songs that were not easy to dance to. By midnight, all of Poppy’s friends were slumping on the edges of the room in serious little female huddles of conversation – growing maudlin and slipping out into the brisk night air to give the sweat on their shins a chance to dry.

  Harry was famous at Dalton. In the dining hall, on one of the oak-panelled walls, was a list of names, winners of various school tournaments and awards. Under the provost’s annual award for sporting attainment, the name Harrison Bellgrave blazed against the dark wood three years running. Poppy was star-struck by him. She liked to imagine what it was like to be him, crowned in his mother’s famous gold curls, surrounded always by friends whose names were printed on the backs of their jackets, friends who sat on the tables in the canteen and shouted to each other across the narrow hallways as if the school was too small for them.

  He could have chosen anyone but that night he chose her. She had been feeling so rotten, so keen not to be left alone in her own skin, nursing a drink while she skulked near the bar, too self-aware to dance alone.

  When he’d asked her to dance, she’d asked herself why not. When he’d kissed her under the disco ball, his mouth had tasted of grenadine syrup and rum. He’d hailed a taxi back to his empty townhouse and when Poppy had slipped her shoes off in the entrance hall the marble beneath her heels felt glacial.

  When he brought the condom out between his fingers, pink and shiny and cheap as toffee, she said it out loud: ‘Why not? Why the hell not?’

  Harry had been tipsy and slurring his words, his eyes bright, his face flushed.

  It’s happening, Poppy had thought, waiting for the explosion inside of her.

  It was nothing like she’d imagined. She’d hoped that sex would be the opposite of loneliness. Perhaps during all those nights spent staring into the gloom at Dalton or watching her mother sob into her coffee, perhaps what her empty body had yearned for was another body. Despite the bathroom stall chatter, Poppy hadn’t really believed that it could hurt. Not as much as it did. She would tell her dorm-mate later that, ‘it was like shoving a fist in your mouth.’ But even more of a surprise was that, otherwise, sex felt exactly the way she had feared it would. Like getting drunk for the first time, the giggly numbness, the sickening lack of control, the uneasy topple back to consciousness and the ‘is that all?’ Like turning thirteen, like turning twenty. It was a surprise that it wasn’t a surprise.

  He could have chosen any girl but he chose her. This beautiful boy. This rich boy. The only part she’d liked had been the end, Harry’s eyes squeezing shut and then the sound he made, like a child almost, plaintive and soft.

  When he’d rolled over afterwards she’d found that a barrier had dissolved between them. They talked about ‘How does it feel to be loved?’ and laughed about it.

  They had both
been disappointed by fragile mothers, and ignored by their fathers. They were filled with the caution that children of single-parent homes are heir to. If you ever watch the pavement yawn open and swallow whole all the idle pedestrians on the street, you might never stride along it with the same careless ease ever again. You’d never be certain it would hold you. Hungover and sleepy, they’d talked about that as the night slipped by. ‘How does it feel to be loved?’ They agreed they would never be sure.

  She knew that it would end, but not as suddenly as it had. At school the following week he could barely look at her, and then he told the boys in her class that, inside, she felt like sandpaper.

  It was only a year later, when they were both accepted into the Beta, that Harry approached her at the bus stop and suggested the arrangement. He’d tiptoed around the exact words, his lips hiding a smile in the twilight. ‘Twenty-three years is a long time,’ he’d said. ‘It’ll look good to the public. And since we’re both going, and we’ve done it before, and you won’t be able to get pregnant . . .’

  WHEN THEY WERE FINISHED, Harry helped to wash her hair. It grew so fast and thick it was already halfway down her back, and the feeling of his fingers on her scalp, the sweet kiss of the suds slipping down her shoulders, was so good that she began to cry. Harry stopped what he was doing, swept her hair aside like a curtain and kissed her neck. She could feel his nose pressing along the side of her spine; his lips brushed the little hairs that grew there. She longed more than anything to fall asleep in his arms as he stroked her hair, but instead he stepped back, pulling his lovely bare skin away from her, and the cold stung.

  ‘You need to talk to someone,’ he said. ‘Maybe there’s something wrong.’

  ‘With me?’ she asked, and was ashamed to feel more tears welling up in her eyes.

  ‘No. Yes.’ Harry switched off the shower and reached for his briefs. ‘With your head maybe.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘When my mum stopped acting she cried for months and months. All the time. She drew the curtains and slept all day and they said she was ill. Like, mentally . . . so, maybe talk to Fae.’ He shrugged and towelled himself off, flipping his hair back from his chiselled face. He was shrugging off her sadness as if it was still hanging on him, and when he left the bathroom Poppy felt like skin that had been shed.

  LATER ON, WHEN SHE talked to Fae, the doctor offered, again, the silver-sided blister pack of pills she had been recommending for some time. ‘Try them,’ she said. ‘You have to give it a few weeks to start working. Don’t give up.’

  Poppy finally accepted them. ‘Do you think I caught it from my mother?’ she asked.

  Fae smiled sadly, ‘It doesn’t work that way, Poppy. I know it feels serious, but this happens to lots of astronauts on long-duration missions. It’s completely normal.’

  ‘Will these make me feel happy again?’

  ‘Hopefully,’ Fae said, brushing a strand of hair from her sunken eyes. But hers was not the face of a hopeful person. Poppy saw it, then. The distraction in Fae’s face, a glimmer of pain. She gritted her teeth against it. Does she have it too? Poppy wondered. And, if so, how could she help Poppy if she could not help herself?

  Later, Juno posted a list of rules in the crew module. There were only a couple at first, written in her neat hand. Things like No one is exempt from chores – from now on skipping chores required finding a willing replacement amongst the crew to complete the task. Everyone attends dinner – which, she usefully expanded, was vital for crew bonding and team-building. Use the ship’s equipment maturely and responsibly (that includes the airlock!)

  Juno didn’t know that it was already escaping from them, the hope they would need to survive up here.

  ‘You did a great job catching up,’ Juno said, breezing past Poppy with a smile as she read them. She glanced at the list she had pinned up and Poppy thought she could see Juno’s shoulders relax. As if she truly believed that, in the vacuum, the firm hand of order was all they needed to keep themselves from harm.

  JUNO

  25.09.12

  JUPITER WAS SPECTACULAR. THE first time Juno saw it through the window on the control deck she said, ‘It almost looks like another sun from this distance.’

  ‘Well,’ said Eliot, ‘it’s about ten times smaller than the sun. But I see your point. It’s big. Bigger than 1,300 Earths, and it has more than sixty moons. Imagine if our planet had that many moons.’

  ‘The night would look like the fifth of November,’ Commander Sheppard said with a smile, his eyes reflecting the sky.

  The atmosphere of Jupiter was comparable to that of the sun. It was composed of hydrogen and helium, with so many moons in orbit that it was like its own solar system. From their vantage point Juno could only just discern the vermillion belts that circled the planet. She could not yet see any hurricanes, or surging clouds of ammonia crystals. She could not even find the Great Red Spot, the storm that had swirled in the Jovian atmosphere for over 300 years, big enough to engulf Earth twice.

  ‘Is this really a good time for an astronomy lecture?’ Harry said through gritted teeth. He was in the pilot’s seat.

  ‘It’s not for him,’ Poppy said as Eliot held the camera up before his eye. ‘I can’t just show our audience Jupiter in the window. I have to teach them about it.’

  ‘I know,’ Commander Sheppard said. ‘Tell them that Uranus has twenty-seven moons and they are all named after characters in Shakespeare plays.’

  ‘Do you mind repeating that,’ Poppy asked, ‘but to the camera?’ Sheppard obliged, turning to the lens with a smile.

  ‘Uranus,’ he said, as if it had just occurred to him a second ago, ‘has twenty-seven moons and they’re all named after characters in Shakespeare’s plays. The largest are Titania and Oberon.’ Eliot gave him a thumbs-up and turned back to the sight in the window.

  ‘We’re filming this on 29 September.’ Poppy’s voice always chimed with synthetic glee whenever she spoke to her increasingly large following of schoolchildren back on Earth, all keen to be the next cohort to leave for Terra-Two. But Juno was glad to see her back doing her job after two weeks of absence. ‘A quick shout-out to all our viewers who are going back to school this month. Good luck!

  ‘It has taken us almost five months to travel 5.8 AU, or 540,000,000 miles from Earth.’ She gave a low whistle at the figure. ‘And this is just the start of our journey. It will still be a couple of days before we’re close enough to Europa to safely dock with the American space station Orlando. In the meantime, our ship is in the capable hands of Harrison Bellgrave, our commander-in-training.’ Harry’s eyes brightened and he smiled for the camera.

  ‘Switch it off,’ Igor growled from the communication deck, motioning to Harry. ‘This is a serious job. How can he concentrate with all this talk?’

  ‘Igor’s right.’ Commander Sheppard turned to Eliot, Poppy and Juno. ‘I think you both have tutorials to get to. And it will be a while before we’ll be able to see Europa. Longer still before we spot the American station, and you’ll get a better view of it from the observation deck.’

  Juno sighed and drifted towards the door. She wanted to stay in the control room – seeing the planet in the window reminded her that they were really going somewhere, instead of suspended in the darkness of space. In a few weeks, they would meet other astronauts – she smiled at the thought – and in just over a year they would be the first humans to leave the solar system entirely.

  Fae was kneeling in front of the monitor on the communications deck, cursing in German.

  ‘Still not working?’ Juno asked as she walked past, glancing at the flickering static. Fae turned to Juno, her eyes red-rimmed and narrow. She let out a growl of frustration that made everyone jump, her voice a soprano knife-edge over the low buzzing of machines. She stormed from the room, the hatch hissing shut behind her.

  ‘Wow.’ Juno let out a whistle of surprise.

  ‘Maybe she can’t get through to Ground?’ said Eliot.

&n
bsp; ‘Or Moritz,’ Sheppard mumbled.

  ‘Who?’ Juno asked.

  ‘Her husband or boyfriend or something,’ Poppy said. ‘He works for the European Space Agency.’

  Juno had never even asked about Fae Golinsky’s family.

  ‘You’re still talking!’ Igor grunted, and Juno left the room.

  It was past time for her tutorial with Fae and she was dreading it. Increasingly, she felt, it had been her tedious job to navigate the hostile and ever-changing landscapes of everyone’s moods. When they were alone together during lessons, Fae seemed to simmer constantly with a quiet rage. Whenever she spoke it was through gritted teeth. She left dinner early to be alone or to tune and retune the communication channels on deck, trying to reach home. Poppy wasn’t much better. The previous week she had caught up on her chores but whenever Juno entered the room she would fall silent and narrow her eyes. There was no companionship to be found with the boys, who had fallen out since the airlock incident. Harry and Jesse rarely came within a metre of each other. And Astrid only wanted to discuss New Creationist theories.

  As Juno headed towards the infirmary, she noticed Jesse walking towards her. She still couldn’t look at him without her pulse thumping in her ears; without thinking of the afternoon in the greenhouse when he’d tried to kiss her. ‘Hey,’ he said, averting his gaze. The corridor was narrow and he had to stop and stand aside to let her pass. Juno nodded and dived into the infirmary, where Fae sat with her head in her hands. Juno had entered so quickly that it took a second for her to take in the scene; Fae hunched over her desk with the heels of her palms pressed into the hollows of her eyes. Music filled the room, Tchaikovsky pealing from the little speaker in the corner. Some nights, Juno walked past the infirmary and heard The Sleeping Beauty seeping under the door, and she imagined that when the crew were asleep, Fae emerged like a night-blooming flower, tearing off her lab coat to cabriole across the floor. But when Astrid had asked Fae over dinner if she ever kept up with her ballet and if she could teach them a few steps, Fae had said, ‘I never dance now’ with such miserable finality that all Juno’s whimsical imaginings evaporated.