Temi Oh - Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

JUNO

T-MINUS 12 HOURS

AFTER JUNO HAD BEEN driven back to the space centre, she and the rest of the crew returned to a different kind of fray. Reporters were gathered at the gates, their cars parked all the way up the street. The driver had to take them around to a side road and up through a shadowed back entrance where directors, police and public relations officers were gathered.

They were ushered immediately into separate rooms. Required first to give a statement to the police, and then the Astronaut Office, the school’s directors and finally to undergo a psychological assessment and mental health screening.

By the time the gruelling round of tests was over, Juno emerged from the windowless room to find that the sun had set long ago, that night was marching on, and yet the launch felt more distant than it had three weeks ago.

Before Juno was sent for an inspection in the medical exam room, a technician led her towards a cubicle with a bathtub and shower and said, ‘Twenty minutes, and make sure to scrub under your nails’ before he closed the door,

Juno was glad to climb out of her clothes. The day had been so humid that when she peeled off her T-shirt the air was ripe with the smell of her body. She sat on the porcelain edge of the tub and watched the water gush out of the tap. Her hands were shaking.

She ran the water so hot that it scalded her feet at first. But she gritted her teeth and surrendered herself to it, letting herself slip down until it lapped over her head.

There would be no bath on the Damocles . Just as there had been no baths in the dormitories at Dalton. Only spartan shower cubicles and lukewarm water. If she launched tomorrow this would be her last bath before she and her sister could swim into the hot springs in the mountains of Terra-Two.

Although Juno wasn’t sure they were going anywhere anymore.

She held her breath under the water until her body screamed for oxygen and then she held on longer still, until the pain of deprivation squeezed her lungs in a vice. Finally, she lost control of her legs, her knees unbuckled and her feet smacked the side of the bath. She jolted upright and came up gasping like a newborn, splashing in blind panic and scrubbing suds from her eyes.

Was there a worse way to die?

She had seen a picture of a drowned boy on the front page of a newspaper the previous June. His head had been half-submerged in water and in the midsummer temperatures putrefaction had already begun. Algae had attached to portions of his little body, multiplied and formed a living layer of slime around the side of his mouth and the hollows of his half-open eyes…

An hour earlier, when the police had asked her what happened, Juno had to remind herself that she hadn’t actually seen anything. By the time Juno, Poppy and the public affairs officer reached the Embankment, it was the chattering throng that had told her what happened.

Someone’s just died. Some girl.

The girl. That girl’s an astronaut.

Just jumped in.

No, she fell in. My kid saw her.

The girl from the magazines. The girl from the news. One of them, anyway.

Looked like an accident to me.

If suicide looks like an accident…

When Juno climbed out of the bath she felt the ground shift under her feet and she had to reach out for the handrail to stop herself from slipping. The mirror was fogged up, and it was a relief not to catch a glimpse of her own reflection. She had been awake now for almost twenty-four hours and the day was far from done.

‘Are you ready?’ A little tap came on the other side of the door.

‘Yes.’ Juno pulled on a white cotton bathrobe and stepped out into the medical exam room. It was filled with the familiar acid smell of antiseptic and the citrus tang of floor cleaner. Two suited flight surgeons stood near a trolley. Juno had been in the same room earlier in the week for a pulmonary function test and a bone density exam. A nurse had clipped her nails down so far that they bled and just before her bath that evening she had been swabbed again for contaminants.

‘Can you step into the scanner please?’ said the first man, indicating the door. Juno walked slowly towards it, taking care not to let her wet feet slip on the ground.

She climbed out of her robe and crept through the door. The cold of the room was a shock to her bare skin, and the hairs along her forearms stood on end. ‘Please hold your arms out and place your feet on the markers below,’ buzzed the voice of one of the doctors over the intercom. Juno could not see them examining her naked body on the other side of the wall. She looked at the indicators on the ground and placed her feet upon them, stretching out her arms like a gymnast. Any contaminants that remained on her body would fluoresce under the light.

She had heard the stories about astronauts who were decertified the morning of the launch after failing an eleventh-hour medical examination. In the closed air system of a spacecraft, viruses spread rapidly and threatened the success of a mission, especially during long-term missions such as theirs, where medical supplies were limited and protracted exposure to radiation would eventually weaken their immune systems.

Juno thought about Noah and couldn’t help imagining his hands leaving marks on her body, little pockets of bacteria.

She’d heard the Thames described as a ‘biohazard’; after heavy rain it acted as an overflow for the city’s sewers, and Astrid had come into contact with it. What if Juno was certified to fly and her sister wasn’t? The thought of facing the darkness of space alone filled her with panic.

‘ Are you all right? ’ A voice over the intercom.

‘Y-yes.’ Juno swallowed deeply and straightened her back. Now was not the time to break down. She was an astronaut. Now was the time to show the supervisors that she could shoulder anything and still do her job. ‘I’m fine, sir.’

‘ Here comes the flash. ’ A mechanical voice counted… four, three, two… ‘ Close your eyes. ’

Juno squeezed them shut – one – and even then she could still see the flare. Her eyelids lit up pink for a few seconds and the beating capillaries in her retina flickered red. Her nerves screamed for an instant, but she gritted her teeth against the pain. When she opened her eyes again her vision was bleached green and her skin stung as if she had been sunburned.

‘ Well, ’ came the voice of the second doctor, ‘ you’re all done. It didn’t hurt much, did it? ’

Juno let out a breath that she didn’t know she had been holding, stepped out into the exam room and pulled her robe back on. ‘Only a little,’ she agreed as the spots in her vision began to fade.

Outside, the doctors were huddled over a monitor, checking the readouts from the scanner, which were scrolling up the screen.

‘Um…’ Juno lingered in the middle of the room, the cold creeping up her calves. ‘When will I find out if I’m certified to fly?’

‘That depends on the results,’ one of them said.

‘It depends on whether I was exposed to anything today, right?’

‘Amongst other things.’

‘Um… do you think you could tell me—’

‘Look, it’s not really our decision.’ The doctor turned around to face her. Above his mask, his tired grey eyes were all Juno could see. ‘We just run the tests.’

Juno nodded and left the exam room, water dripping down her neck. She took the shortcut back to her dormitory, via the emergency stairwell in the side of the building, but when she pushed the heavy door open she was surprised to find Poppy and Astrid huddled on the shadowed landing. Poppy was wrapped in an identical bathrobe, and her wet hair hung down her back like rats’ tails. Astrid was sobbing hysterically, the kind of desperate wailing that Juno had only heard when they were children.