by Temi Oh
‘I don’t know,’ Eliot said.
‘Do you think we could have stopped her?’ Juno asked. The question she asked herself every day, why she’d not just grabbed Ara at the BIS and begged her to stay.
‘I don’t know,’ Poppy said. ‘Ara wanted to die. Clearly. I mean – she must have. And if she did, I don’t know if there’s anything we could have done to stop her.’
‘Is that your medical opinion?’ Eliot asked
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘People want to die all the time, Eliot,’ Juno said. ‘It’s a mental illness. Our first, most basic, instinct is to keep ourselves alive. It’s innate, it’s the reason we put clothes on our backs and food in our mouths and make penicillin. When that urge is gone then something is—’
‘Broken?’ Eliot let out a derisive laugh. ‘You think we could have fixed her?’
‘Maybe,’ Juno said, but her voice came out thin. The effort of standing had exhausted her, but when she sat down on the frozen ground she immediately regretted it. It was cold as a mortuary slab.
‘Maybe,’ said Poppy finally. ‘And maybe we’ll never know. We can spend our whole lives guessing and blaming each other but maybe we just have to forgive.’
‘You think?’ Eliot lifted his head to look at her. Poppy nodded. ‘Say goodbye?’ he asked and she nodded again. ‘But . . . then I’d really be alone.’ Tears seeped slowly from his eyes.
‘No.’ Poppy knelt down and grabbed his hand. ‘We need you.’
‘But . . .’ He looked past her, at the shadows beyond the cracked spires, ‘you know she’s here with me.’
‘Right now?’ Juno’s heart sank. It was worse than she had thought. Eliot was clearly suffering from some kind of delusion.
But Poppy simply continued stroking his hand calmly. ‘She needs to leave.’ She said it like an order, with a strength that Juno had never seen. Said it as if she could command him back from the world between the living and the dead.
Of course, Juno thought, of course this is a conversation Poppy is comfortable engaging in. Poppy, who had fought to find strength in the face of her own depression.
‘Tell her. We need you here.’
Tears squeezed from Eliot’s eyes. ‘I don’t think I can,’ he said.
‘I know,’ Poppy soothed. ‘It takes courage to be alone. But you have to tell her that she can’t stay. Tell her that you forgive her but you have decided, today, to live.’
ELIOT
18.02.13
TEMPERATURE: -3°C
O2: 68% SEA LEVEL
WEEKS UNTIL RESCUE: 6
FOR THE REST OF his life, Eliot’s mind would always roam back to the edge of the Thames, and he would never properly understand what made her jump.
He’d left the Earth less than twenty-four hours after Ara had died. Had not seen her body again, after it had been carted away from Embankment. He had not attended her funeral, and the guilt of the abandonment crushed him.
When Juno and Poppy took him down to the infirmary, Eliot had been delirious with hypothermia. He’d thought that he could see Ara everywhere he looked.
His nerves had been on fire. Electric shocks arrowed up his toes and along the arch of his foot as Fae had tried to warm them. In his confusion, he’d thought he’d heard Juno and the doctor mention frostbite. ‘I think he might lose them,’ one of them had said.
Eliot cried so much that finally Fae injected something into his IV to put him to sleep, and in his dream he was walking through the ship, Ara’s hand in his. Through the window, he could see that they were close enough to Terra-Two for him to discern mountain ranges.
‘You can’t come with me,’ he told her. Her hand, in his, was heavy as a millstone.
‘Of course I can.’ She smiled the way she used to when they shared an inside joke.
‘We used to go everywhere together,’ he told her. He and Ara had grown up like two trees with their roots twisted together. Both of them liked to believe that, together, they were twice as strong. Although, silently, they knew that without the other they were crippled.
He saw them both, watching the long surf rise and fall near his uncle’s house in Southerndown. Getting drunk in Brockwell Park, their blood sizzling with champagne, lying on their backs in the floodlit grass, talking about God and Terra-Two and the Damocles, which was shining above them even then.
In his dream, he wheeled through memories as they flashed like a life before his eyes. Her life. A surprise party in Ara’s garden, their grinning mouths black with braces. Ara in her white school uniform, her shirt see-through and dripping from a water fight in the garden. The summer she bleached her hair candy-floss pink. By sixteen, Eliot and Ara were roughly the same height and their darkly lashed eyes and long hair made them look like long-lost siblings, their fingers entwined. Both of them thin and dour as refugees.
Ara’s theory was that lovers had been conjoined twins in a past life, sentenced to look for each other in the next, bereft until they found the one person with a hollow in their chest shaped like the bump on their own.
‘I can’t go with you,’ he said. And his own life flickered before him. His jaw growing square at twenty-three, etched with stubble. At thirty, sketching a new design for an updated VASIMR engine, improving on Igor’s design. At forty, setting foot on Terra-Two, staring down at his hand as he touched rain. ‘I remember this,’ he’d say to himself. He saw it all, the abundance of the life before him, another seventy years perhaps. And he wanted it.
‘I can’t have both,’ he told her as they approached the airlock. In the low oxygen, it took all the strength he had to haul open the hatch.
‘Both of what?’ she asked as she stepped inside the airlock, and waited for him to follow after her. For a moment, Eliot almost did. He stared at her bare feet on the ground, the way her hair floated around her head. His love for her cut like a knife, now. Caused him nothing but pain and so it was a relief, almost, to shut the hatch between them.
He reached over to the gearbox and found the emergency eject button. As he did, there was a banging against the porthole window, frantic pounding. Eliot saw that Ara was shouting his name in a panic. He froze, his mouth dry, considered again what this meant, a life without her. It was the only one he could have.
He remembered what Poppy had told him, that grieving for Ara would be like an uphill climb, a terrifying journey back to himself. This story, too, was a love story. It had only just begun.
WHEN HE AWOKE A day later, two of his toes were gone. But Eliot’s chest was light with freedom. ‘We had to,’ Juno said, leaning down to examine the wound dressing. In the cold, her hands were shaking violently. ‘They were too damaged.’ Eliot struggled to sit up, his arms trembling under him.
‘Does it hurt?’ she asked.
Eliot turned to the window and pressed his hand against it. Looked for her in the blackness. ‘She’s gone,’ he told Juno. And he actually laughed. The sound foreign but wonderful in his mouth.
‘Who?’ Juno asked. Behind the glass there was only the vacuum, and his own face. His own smiling face. ‘Eliot, are you okay?’
‘I’m . . . ?’ He said it like a question, as if he was experimenting with the sound of it. ‘I’m . . . okay? I am okay.’
ASTRID
20.02.13
TEMPERATURE: -9°C
O2: 65% SEA LEVEL
WEEKS UNTIL RESCUE: 6
THEY RELEASED ASTRID FROM confinement after Eliot’s accident. With Commander Sheppard gone, and Eliot sick, the crew needed all the hands that they could get. Astrid saw that they were all unravelling now, in different ways. The Russian expedition would not arrive for another six weeks. The temperature on the ship had dropped to below freezing, which meant that ice formed silver veins along the windows. If Astrid ever reached out to touch the walls of the ship, the cold was like a razor to her nerves. All but essential chores fell by the wayside. They spent long hours sleeping in their cabins, although the cold often woke them. Fae told them
to check their bodies regularly for frostbite. After witnessing what happened to Eliot, Astrid was terrified of losing her own toes. During her time in the infirmary, she had scoured Fae’s books on human physiology. Found the chapters on high altitude and hypothermia. Pages of medical photographs of frostbite, thumbs and earlobes black as coal, nails falling off toes, skin that looked like it had been burned by the cold. The pictures made her sick. And yet she could not stop herself from reading. She discovered that the slow reduction of oxygen would be accompanied by “inexorable deterioration of the body”, a phrase that echoed in her nightmares. She discovered that some people acclimatised a little but that by the time the air pressure dropped below 40 per cent, they were all likely to be dead.
When she left the infirmary, the monitors in the control room and service module indicated that the oxygen levels had fallen to 65 per cent that of sea level. Which meant they were now all suffering from some form of altitude sickness. Harry, Jesse and Juno all complained of headaches so bad that during their morning conferences they would lean over the table, barely able to see for the pain. A few of them had developed a dry cough and they all stood at the top of the ladder, dizzy and winded with exhaustion from the effort of pulling their own weight up. Astrid woke often in the middle of the night in a sudden horror that she had stopped breathing. Cold sweat freezing the damp cotton between her legs, feet numb with cold even under two pairs of socks.
Astrid heard that while she had been in confinement, the rest of the crew had been attempting to trudge through some semblance of routine, eating silent meals in the kitchen, watching films together in the crew module. Astrid could not help suspecting that whatever positive feelings any of her crewmates might once have harboured for her had well and truly eroded. She’d sentenced them to this fate. In tearful corridor conversations, Astrid overheard them saying as much. There had been no messages from the Russian expedition that was apparently coming to their rescue, but Astrid kept running up to the Atlas module to search the skies for a sight of their shuttle, with the desperate regularity of a sailor waiting for landfall. Each time, she found nothing but the void.
One horrible morning, Juno did not wake at the sound of the bell. She was still in her bed after breakfast and when Astrid went to find her and pulled her duvet down, she saw that the side of her face was wet with vomit, only the whites of her eyes visible, lips purple.
Astrid cried out, panic darkening her vision. Stabbing her fingers under her sister’s jaw, she detected a slow pulse. She scooped Juno into her arms, never mind the nail-varnish smell of her bile, and carried her to the infirmary. Juno was light as a bird, maybe seven stone or less, Astrid saw now, and it broke her heart. The hard edges of her pelvis pushed insistently above the band of her pyjamas. All this time, her sister had needed her help and Astrid had been too preoccupied to see it.
When she reached the infirmary, Fae looked down at Juno with a sad expression of inevitability, as if she was watching a vase topple from a great height, the predictable crack. She’d been waiting for this – knew it was only a matter of time before the low oxygen made one of them seriously sick.
She explained that it was likely Juno was suffering from high-altitude cerebral oedema, which occurs when a lack of oxygen causes swelling of the brain tissue. She tied an oxygen mask to Juno’s face and gave her a dose of a drug to ease the swelling, but Fae didn’t pull any punches when she gave Astrid the prognosis.
‘People die of this,’ she said, her voice grim. ‘I’ve seen it in healthy men and women who climb mountains. Young people. They get a headache and then as the air gets thinner they get sicker and sicker. Many fall into a coma and do not wake up. I’m not going to lie to you. She could be dead in hours.’
Astrid could barely think through the steel vice of her own headache. She stumbled down the halls of the ship, fighting tears. Everything her sister had said about her had been right. Astrid had made this selfish, reckless choice, sentenced everyone to this death. The realization made her sick with self-loathing.
For the first time in her life the foundations of her hope began to crumble. For the past few years Terra-Two had been so wondrously close, so certainly in her future. And, today, she saw it receding from her even as she clutched desperately and foolishly for it. She felt like Tessa Dalton, dying alone at the edge of that fountain, the cold creeping in, her mad eyes fixed on the distant star where the planet spun, still believing that if she could just grasp a little further she could get there eventually.
That had been over a century ago, and here was Astrid – fool that she was! – doing the same thing.
When she entered the control room, Igor was there. Astrid began to cry. ‘I’ve killed them all,’ she said. Igor looked at her silently. ‘My sister. All my friends. This is my fault, everything that’s happened.’
“ ‘Regretting the past is like chasing wind”,’ Igor said. ‘Something we say in Norilsk. This is the situation we are in now.’
Astrid looked at the old cosmonaut. Fae had given him an oxygen tank, with a cannula that ran under his nose. He was already only surviving with the use of one lung; the plummeting temperature and oxygen pressure was sure to kill him soon. Astrid could not help the uncharitable thought that they would run out of all their supplies of medical oxygen sooner with Igor using it. The sound of his breathing made her wince, the sticky sound of fluid filling lungs, the muscles in his neck straining every time he inhaled. He, of course, had always known he was never going to make it to Terra-Two.
‘How can you bear it?’ Astrid asked, tears streaming down her face. ‘Never going? How could Tessa?’
Igor looked at her as if she’d asked a foolish question, his eyes widened in surprise. ‘You don’t need to go there, to go there.’ Astrid looked at the old man quizzically. ‘This place, Terra-Two. This country that you dream of, that Tessa dreamt of. Perhaps you don’t need to touch the ground, to smell the air.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Perhaps that’s what this new religion of yours is all about. New Creationists. Perhaps this thing you feel, this hope, this belief, is the only thing that you need. It is – what’s the word? – transcendent.’
JUNO
WHENEVER SHE FELL ASLEEP time flew by.
The first night, she opened her eyes to see the solar system in miniature, the Earth cast in brass, spinning around the sun on spokes. It was Solomon Sheppard’s armillary sphere, and in her fever it looked as if the sun itself was shining. She was in his old bedroom. Then in the infirmary where he had died.
When she awoke next, she was in a plastic tent. A hyperbaric chamber. Juno knew that if she could just work up the energy to roll onto her side she would find a clock on the far wall and then she’d be able to anchor herself a little in time. She would talk herself into it, steel herself for the task, but she’d drift back to sleep before she managed it. Finally, she gave up trying to move her limbs or to lift her eyelids and she tried to guess the time by the sounds on the ship. The muffled thump of footsteps outside, the voices of the others in the kitchen, Fae rushing in and out of the room, taking her temperature, scribbling notes.
Once she managed to cry out Astrid’s name, her voice a pathetic rasp, and she felt a hand in hers, cool and firm.
‘I’m here,’ her sister would say, and Juno had never been so grateful.
‘What’s wrong with me?’ she asked.
‘The thing that’s wrong with all of us. We’re running out of air,’ Astrid said, and Juno felt a tear splash against her wrist.
The pain, which came and went, made her cry out and clutch at her head – she thought someone was forcing a screwdriver through her temples.
Juno drifted in and out of technicolour interstellar dreams. She thought about God. Once, in class, her French teacher had pointed to ‘le ciel’ and said, ‘You know, where they used to believe heaven was.’ Juno had asked in shock ‘Where do they think it is now?’ She’d been on the edge of her seat at this new revelation.
‘I’m here, Juno,’ said Astrid and Jesse, each holding a hand as she gasped in pain. This pain, it would grind the bones in her skull to salt.
Her mind was a kaleidoscope of fantasy.
Unhinged questions.
Why had Juno never wondered where all the gods disappeared to?
In astronomy, Jupiter was only a quiet giant in the sky, big enough to hold over 1,000 Earths but not as solid as one. She had never wondered what had happened to the god that shared its name. Jove or Zeus, the dispenser of skylight. What happened to Anat, knee-deep in blood, wrestling Ba’al’s enemies. She saw now that they must have retreated somewhere, these defunct deities, and she thought she knew where.
‘Terra-Two?’ she shouted in her confusion. Only one answer.
‘I don’t think she’s going to make it.’
Juno tried not to cry out again, but her head had been seared open. ‘I can see everything,’ she gasped, ‘and it’s beautiful.’
JESSE
21.02.13
TEMPERATURE: -12°C
O2: 62% SEA LEVEL
WEEKS UNTIL RESCUE: 7
‘JESSE?’ HE’D FALLEN ASLEEP in Solomon’s room again. He knew before Fae touched his shoulder and he opened his eyes because it was colder in there, and the smell of vapour rub and antiseptic clung to everything. He was too cold to feel his feet.
‘Jesse?’
He straightened his back, pins and needles stinging his right calf and prickling his numb hands.
Jesse looked across at the girl he loved. For a while she’d drifted in and out of sleep, mumbling in confusion and shouting disjointed phrases. Often, she didn’t recognize him. She had not regained consciousness for six hours. Though Fae periodically put her in a portable hyperbaric chamber, she’d stopped showing signs of improvement and Fae was wary about using up their supplies of oxygen. They would all need it, in the end.