by Laura Lam
“Cavendish. Our new world. Our frontier.”
Years ago, they’d found a gas giant, Aegir, named after Ran’s husband, the god of the ocean. Aegir was too large for life—akin to Jupiter. The smaller planet was hidden behind it in the Goldilocks zone, or the circumstellar habitable zone. Not too hot, not too cold. The right temperature for water to be liquid on the surface given the right atmospheric pressure. For life to potentially grow.
The planet was brilliant blue and green, covered with swirls of clouds. Yet instead of grand continents, there were a few just big enough to be deserving of the name. Smatterings of smaller islands dotted the oceans, though plenty of them were at least the size of Great Britain. A planet of archipelagos. Its moon was even a similar size, creating tides in those alien seas. It had oxygen and rich biodiversity in the early stages of life, well enough established to have stable elemental cycles that could sustain agriculture. Humans could theoretically live there.
“I won’t bother you with a list of the technical details, but Cavendish is closer to its star than Earth, so a year lasts one hundred and seventy-eight days. The sun is dimmer, but still warm enough to keep temperatures far more constant and habitable than Earth has become.”
The view flickered to an artist’s rendition of what it would be like to stand on the surface of Cavendish, overlooking the shore of one of the islands. It could be Earth, save for the fact that the sun was dimmer, more orange-red, and 1.6 times larger in the sky, for the smaller star of Ran had to be closer to heat Cavendish enough for life.
Naomi glanced at the audience. They’d all heard of Cavendish, of course, but it’d been a nebulous thing, still out of reach. With that artwork, they could imagine themselves standing on the shore. Free from a filter mask, from haze in the sky from smog or fire. It looked lush, primordial—like Earth back in the Jurassic era, before humans had come along to interfere.
The projection blinked to show our solar system, then Earth, rotating gently in a near mirror image to Cavendish, a sickly older sibling. Valerie gave the audience time to take in the differences between the worlds before zooming back out to a view of both Earth and Mars.
“Until relatively recently, we never thought we’d actually be able to journey to our neighbour stars and planets. Even Alpha Centauri seemed decades away. But with Hawthorne and NASA working together to harness negative energy and demonstrating that the Alcubierre drive is a workable concept, the universe is at our fingertips.”
Whispers rustled around the room, less aggressive than before. Another flick of Valerie’s manicured nails and the ceiling showed the warp ring around Mars, still under construction. The materials had been mined from Mars or nearby asteroids, built in situ on the planet by Hawthorne robots, then ferried up to the construction hub.
“I’m sure most of you here have been following the reports,” Valerie continued. “The construction of our Atalanta interstellar spacecraft is ahead of schedule. Successful jumps of unmanned probes elsewhere in the solar system, and then out to Ran once we accurately calculated where we’d want a spaceship to appear on the other end of the jump. We’ve proved we can bring back biomatter from Cavendish, and we have successfully transported Earth specimens through the ring and back again.”
Valerie neglected to mention that the first rounds of rats under Hawthorne supervision also returned dead as doornails. Like Laika, who overheated to death above the Earth in the 1960s, another stepping stone in the space race. The plants hadn’t fared much better. The soil and seeds from Cavendish had arrived still viable—a highlight of Naomi’s career a few years ago, when she’d last worked at Hawthorne.
Yet they would need Earth plants to survive on Cavendish as it had no food crops. Every experiment they conducted with soil and light that mirrored Cavendish levels had failed. For months, the seedling kept dying.
Fortunately, following the changes in gene expression patterns over the time it took the last round of seedlings to die had allowed Dr. Dennis Lee to come up with a series of modifications to their developmental pathways. These accounted for the dimmer light and differences in iron concentrations and pH in the Cavendish soil. It was only the last few tests that had proved promising, so hopefully once they landed on the tantalising, lush, untapped world, they wouldn’t slowly starve to death.
“The maths and the physics check out,” Valerie continued. “We’ve done all the testing, but time keeps relentlessly ticking along—we haven’t cracked time travel yet.” A grin, a pause for a few chuckles.
“With your assistance, your shared vision of this future, we can finish the construction on the Atalanta. We can go to Cavendish within three to five years. Imagine—within a decade, all of humanity could have a fresh start. No more refugees. Just a world where we all thrive.”
More murmurings. Valerie held her palms up, placating. “Naturally, I’m not suggesting we abandon Earth or Mars entirely. We can continue our efforts to undo the damage already done here and make our nearest neighbour habitable. But it’ll be a damn sight easier if not as many of us are around, pumping more carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere. Why have one or two or—God forbid—zero worlds, when you can have three?”
She beamed out at the audience. “We won’t waste Cavendish. We will cherish it, and not repeat our past mistakes. I haven’t been shy about my desire to spearhead the mission there. I want to bring you Cavendish. So let me help you. Let’s save ourselves.”
The ballroom erupted in applause. Among the clapping, Naomi spotted the still doubtful looks, the whispers out of the corners of mouths. Yet she also saw people gazing up at Valerie with wet eyes, clapping hard. Valerie didn’t need to convince everyone in this room. She only needed to convince enough to finish building that ship.
Valerie kept her head high. As if there had never been protests verging on the violent when she showed up for speeches. As if countless think pieces hadn’t called her little more than a pop-science feminist talking head. A woman with more money than sense. They said she was wasting a fortune on far-off possibilities rather than making a difference to the people on this rock. Naomi had feared for Valerie’s safety a time or two. It’d only take one conference where security was too lax. It’d only take one angry man with a gun. But Valerie never seemed bothered. She was someone who photosynthesised limelight and controversy.
Cavendish remained on the ceiling, full and bright, a circle around the chandeliers.
Valerie made her way back to her seat, and the food arrived. It was good—as it should be, if people were paying upwards of thirty thousand dollars for a seat at the table. Wild mushroom soup, bacon-wrapped chicken—all vat grown—and scalloped potatoes. Fresh green salad, cold and crisp. Poached pears in wine with vegan Chantilly cream for dessert. Ingredients that were increasingly dear, not that anyone in this ballroom was struggling to afford it. Most of the people in this room probably still ate meat regularly—actual meat, grown on the hoof or claw.
Naomi ate her food, kept up her idle chit-chat. Her gaze would sometimes stray across the room, snag on the way Mel’s hand rested on Cole’s forearm. The softness of her smile as she looked at her husband. Naomi felt a brief pain, dulled by two years. Something like yearning, like relief. Naomi was not the woman she thought she would be when she married Cole. She was someone else. Not better, not worse. Different.
The waiters cleared the tables after the meal to ready the ballroom for the dancing. The guests clustered along the balcony, gazing out at the sunset over Avalon. Glasses of champagne, murmured conversation. Naomi slipped between it all, listening so she could report back to Valerie later. She sensed excitement, resentment. Many, she was sure, thought Valerie’s goal would crumble and they’d relish the fall. They’d still pretend to support her vision. They’d run the Earth right into the ground, shrug, and live up on a privately constructed space station, gazing down at the world below them and sigh “isn’t that a shame” before spearing another hors d’oeuvre and taking another glass of bubbly. She was annoye
d at how much Hawthorne needed these sycophantic vultures to have a chance at their goal. To save everyone, not just the rich.
The glitzy attendees streamed back into the ballroom as the stringed music began. Naomi took her time, nursing her drink, a wallflower near the rose-coloured walls. People paired off, the women’s skirts belling as they swirled.
Cole and Mel danced, his hand on her waist. A night away from their child. Had they even been out since the baby’s birth? The sitter or nanny would almost certainly be staying overnight, so this might be their first uninterrupted night’s sleep in months. Or their first chance at privacy. She skittered away from that thought.
A year ago, seeing them would have ripped Naomi apart. Attraction still bloomed between her and Cole. It maybe always would. For all their faults, the physical connection had been one uncomplicated area of their marriage. When Cole met her eyes, she knew he felt it, too. She gave him a sardonic little salute, smirking when he was the one to look away first.
Valerie came over, bringing Naomi a new glass of champagne.
“Well done,” Naomi said. “They’re eating out of your hand.”
Valerie surveyed the ballroom and gave a long, satisfied exhale. “They are, aren’t they?”
By the end of the night, thanks to Valerie’s charm offensive, there would be another round of investment. Mission accomplished.
They clinked glasses.
CHAPTER SIX
32 Days After Launch
94 Days to Mars
217 Days to Cavendish
The greenhouse was both the heart and the stomach of the ship.
When people think of space greenhouses, they think of them as more or less like the ones back on Earth. Or in science fiction films, an area of the ship that would essentially be an entire forest, with trees rising from soil on the ground, and false sunlight illuminating the trunks leading to the glorious glass ceilings that looked out on to the stars.
Naomi’s domain was not green. It could be, if all the glowing LED lamps were turned off, and the normal pale lights throughout the rest of the ship turned on. Instead, everything glowed magenta. The combination of blue and red lights made the plants appear black as they soaked up the energy, nothing reflected. Naomi had long since started calling them her goth plants.
The lab was as small a footprint as possible to grow all that they needed. The walls were lined with two rows of glowing, horizontal glass tubes running across the wall in neat rows stacked from floor to ceiling, segmented every three feet so Naomi could slot the algae vials in and out as needed. She’d grown six batches of cyanobacteria so far, staggering the seven-day growth cycles.
She was often alone in her lab. Lebedeva would come in and check the hardware for the bioreactors or to service the harvester. The algae levels had to remain above a certain level, as they were part of the life support system, concentrating carbon dioxide from the air with machines and bubbling the CO2-enriched air to the bioreactors. The algae grew faster as a result, which gave the ship a buffer on carbon dioxide and oxygen levels in the air.
Hart would be in more as the weeks progressed. Naomi knew plants, but Irene Hart understood bodies. Together, they’d conduct tests to ensure the five women on board were receiving adequate nutrition and had healthy gut flora. The walls and floors throughout the ship were already peppered with radiation detectors, which all showed normal levels so far. The shields were holding. But Hart would also run full biomedical scans to ensure that they wouldn’t be riddled with cancer by Cavendish.
First, Naomi had to grow the food.
The GMO strains of spirulina were coming along nicely. She walked through the thin, purple corridor of reinforced glass tubes, checking the readings, taking down the segments with mature culture and putting them into the harvester machine that would turn them into pellets or powder. Mostly it created gummy nutriblocks the size and texture of Turkish delight but even more foul.
They could make a “savoury” flavour that tasted of a stale pond, sometimes with added salt or chilli, or “sweet” flavours that were vaguely strawberry, vanilla, or cinnamon. Naomi had used some of the skills she’d learned back in undergrad, using vanillin or cinnamaldehyde, whose synthesis could be more or less automated in the nutriblock machine, as long as basic chemical supplies held out. They could continue synthesising more from the waste products of the algae itself once they reached Cavendish. Yet because it was still green and the wrong texture, and they had been unable to tone down the strong taste of spirulina without compromising its nutritional value, it was hard to associate the nutriblocks with any of the flavours.
Everyone was already tired of them, but it would account for seventy-five per cent of their diet. Pound for pound, algae was the most nutrient-dense food they’d found on Earth, full of protein with complete amino acids, some B vitamins, copper, iron, and omega fatty acids.
The rest of the lab was full of crops, to continue their research and provide the astronauts with some much-needed variety in their diet. Hydroponic greens—lettuce, spinach, bok choy—for crunch and texture. Small onions. A few herbs she’d tried adding to nutriblocks with quasi-disastrous results. The rosemary and peppermint ones in particular were like eating soap that had been left in stagnant water. Fruit was limited to actual strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and tomatoes.
Some of her crops required soil pillows and mats. The left side of the lab had Earth soil and light conditions, and the right had Earth soil treated to mirror the nutrient and metal levels from the Cavendish probe samples, illuminated with Cavendish-level lights. She’d already planted the tubers like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and Jerusalem artichokes. Root vegetables such as beetroot and carrots—and they could eat their green tops, as well. She was attempting some dwarf strands of genetically modified wheat and rye, which grew particularly well in colder climates.
Naomi had already proved that Earth crops would grow in “Cavendish” soil back home, but on the Atalanta she’d grow crops at the same time, in the same amounts, and compare the Earth to the Cavendish specimens.
Over the years, Naomi had soaked up anything that would make her a viable astronaut candidate, but from early on, she’d loved plants the best.
She was bringing life to the inhospitable environment of space. This wasn’t the first biome she’d created, but she knew the challenges of closed environments. Like everyone working in space horticulture, she’d studied Biosphere 2 and the challenges they’d faced in the early- to mid-nineties. A crew had volunteered to try and survive in a dome under the hot desert sun. At first, things had gone well enough. Then the bees died. Roaches appeared. A few times, those in charge of the project had had to pump oxygen into the enclosure, which was technically cheating, to stop those within from suffocating.
Everyone inside grew too thin, too hungry, bones stark against skin as they lost weight; chemicals that had been stored in their fat from pesticides they’d eaten had poisoned the air. They’d begun fighting. Friends became enemies. They grew depressed, irritable, hungry. The first mission lasted two years, but the second one was cancelled after less than a year. Those people could emerge, blinking, out into the hot desert, fresh air, life. If Naomi miscalculated, there was nowhere to hide. No reset button.
This type of long-scale isolation was called overwintering, named after long-term missions in the Antarctic. It’d been one of the main reasons Naomi had been so determined to go on her trip to the South Pole the summer before she graduated. She wanted to prove she’d be able to cope with that detachment from the rest of humanity.
She’d found the cold and the dark draining, as anyone would, and she mourned the fact that penguins could only be found in zoos. She’d also discovered pockets of pleasure. Drinking hot chocolate quick, before it cooled. The aurora australis. Keeping to her routine and finding her flow, the work its own form of meditation. Befriending her fellow scientists and playing board games to pass the endless nights. Picking up instruments and creating terrible but hilarious b
ands, with song lyrics full of science puns. Tips and tricks she’d take here on this ship. At least on board, it was warm.
Elsewhere on the Atalanta, all was clean, pristine, immaculate. In her lab, she could smell life, and the artificial sunlight almost felt real. The loamy scent of soil, the strong, oxidant tang of the spirulina. Once her work was done, she’d sit here, on her own, eyes closed, breathing it all in.
She’d allowed herself a small extravagance—zinnia seeds. They were small and light, and their life cycle was short. She touched the tiny sprouts with the tip of her finger. Once they bloomed, she’d take a couple to her room and feed them artificial white sunlight, so she’d be able to see the green stems and the orange flowers. Zinnias were one of the first plants grown on the ISS. They’d gone through the warp ring a few years ago and were officially the first interstellar flowers. The tomatoes and berries would bloom too, but it’d take longer.
Tucked within the cupboard of her lab, with backups down in the Crypt, were the seed vaults. Rows of three-ply foil packages, tidy and unassuming. They were backups in case her current crops failed completely, but they were also what they’d need on Cavendish. It was no Svalbard seed vault, that storage facility deep in the Nordic Arctic tundra, but it was still a mini ark of flora.
A tap at the door. Naomi stifled her annoyance at the interruption. Hart stuck her head into the lab.
“Mary, Mary, quite contrary. How does your garden grow?” she sang. On Earth, Hart had always worn mascara and dark red lipstick, her braids tied up into a high bun on the top of her head. With her short hair and bare face, she looked younger, almost vulnerable. But she’d seemed happy, these last few weeks. Space agreed with her.
“No silver bells or cockle shells,” Naomi replied.
The smile stretched into a wide, white grin. “I just spent an hour in the observation room, staring out that window. Don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that view.”