Temi Oh - Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘Will you be watching it?’ Juno asked.

‘Course,’ Teddy said. ‘Me and my kids. Got the day off. I’m going out to the launch site’ This took her by surprise.

‘You have kids?’ Juno asked, frowning at his patchy stubble and the acne scars faintly visible on his chin.

‘Yep.’ He laughed at her expression. ‘Two. A six-year-old and another who’s eighteen months.’

‘Wow. How old are you?’

‘Twenty-four.’

‘So that means… you had your first child when you were eighteen?’ He nodded. ‘I’m never going to have children.’ The words tumbled out of her mouth before she could stop them.

‘Really? Why?’

It wasn’t Juno’s job to have children. Women would come after her – healthy young colony women whose job it was to grow fat and give birth. But theirs was a pioneer mission. They would land on Terra-Two towards the end of their child-bearing years and start a colony, build the base and chart the land. Perhaps children would come after that, but Juno had been informed that this wasn’t her primary purpose. As soon as she was accepted into the Beta she underwent a procedure that slipped a little implant under her arm, and her periods had dried up.

‘The mission is my child,’ she said. And then, her head full of how heroic that sounded, she said a little louder, ‘Terra-Two is my only child.’

Which wasn’t entirely a lie. Going to space saved her from every other fate. From marriage and having to sleep with Noah, from the disappointment of motherhood, from a lustreless life. She was going to make a different world, a better world, on Terra-Two. A noble ambition – in her mind – the noblest.

Teddy shrugged. ‘I guess that’s why you’re here then. Cos that’s what you want.’

‘Yes.’ She blinked, and with a sudden ache in her stomach remembered the predicament she found herself in – still unsure if she actually would launch tomorrow. ‘That’s right.’ Her eyes flicked towards the screen again. A reporter was holding a microphone and standing in front of Embankment station, a poor-quality video taken on somebody’s phone of Eliot dragging Ara’s body out of the water playing over her shoulder. Juno felt the ground shift under her feet, but took a deep breath to steady herself.

‘You okay?’ Teddy examined her for a moment. ‘They’re saying it’s an accident.’ He nodded at the screen. ‘That you were allowed on an outing before the tree-planting ceremony and she fell in.’

‘I don’t know what happened,’ Juno said, which was true.

Teddy eyed her knowingly and said, ‘Thought so. There’s always a difference between what goes on in here and what I hear ’em saying on there. Between you and me, I think someone’s going to get the axe.’ He leant in conspiratorially. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t—’

He fell quiet and his eyes darted to the door as the susurration of people coming out of the conference room filled the hall.

Juno looked around in surprise. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be caught hanging around in reception, so she headed quickly back down the corridor and towards the refectory.

‘Juno.’

When she turned, she saw Dr Millburrow.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be in bed?’

‘Umm… I was just having dinner.’ Juno’s eyes darted towards the door of the empty refectory.

It was good to see Maggie’s ruddy face. Of all the senior crew charged with looking after them, she was the most like a friend. Juno had been glad when she turned up in her car earlier that day to take them back home and she was glad to see her now.

‘I was just in a meeting with the board of directors and they’ve come to a decision.’ She glanced behind her at the serious-looking men and women in suits who had spilled out into the hall. ‘I thought you better hear this from me.’

Juno felt her stomach drop with a jangled swoop of alarm. Maggie was about to tell her that she was no longer on the mission. That tonight they would all pay for Ara’s actions with their future.

And then, all of a sudden, a quiet kind of abandon came over her. The kind she had felt in the three horrible hours after Astrid discovered she’d made it into the Beta and before Juno had. In those moments, a colourless life beneath the stars and away from her sister extended before her. Now she felt it again. Juno experienced the dim resignation that sometimes came over her in the split second she realized she was about to drop something; the swollen moment after the shift in weight registers and just before the crash.

‘The mission will be going ahead as planned but someone will have to replace Ara. You do realize that, right?’ Juno stared at Maggie dumbfounded. Could it be? Could it be that God had smiled mercifully upon her?

‘We’re going to launch,’ she said, and her throat tightened.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m going to space?’

‘Yes, that’s what the board has agreed.’

‘Oh…’ Juno let out a long breath, leant against the wall to steady herself.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes…’ she gasped. ‘Just… relieved .’

Maggie put a hand on Juno’s shoulder and her eyes softened. ‘It’s been a long day, JJ.’ Juno nodded. ‘Why don’t you go up there and get some sleep?’ She nodded again.

Maggie leant forward and kissed her on the forehead. For a moment Juno’s nose was filled with the sweet lavender scent of her perfume and she exhaled another shaky breath.

‘If I don’t see you in the morning…’

‘You’re supposed to wake us up.’ Maggie nodded as if she had forgotten that fact. Juno had grown used to seeing her silhouette in the doorway in the morning, just after the bell rang. She always smelt sweet as fresh bread and woke them all up by leaning down and stroking their cheeks. Like a mother, almost. Whenever Juno pictured waking up in space she imagined Maggie standing in the doorway and saying, wakie wakie, girls , her own eyes bright and ready to face the day.

‘Sure thing,’ she said with a smile that wilted a little into a grimace. ‘I’m proud of you.’ Maggie added it as an afterthought, when Juno had already taken a couple of steps down the corridor. She stopped and turned back.

‘For what?’

11.0 5.12

T-MINUS 36 HOURS

TWO NIGHTS BEFORE THE launch, Jesse was lying on his bedroom floor listening to news reports from mission control. His sister was speaking to him about attachment, but Jesse was only half listening. He was thinking about the rocket. She kept repeating herself: ‘The thing about attachment,’ she was saying, crossing her legs in front of her, ‘it’s not about not caring, it’s about not clinging.’ The word rang in her throat as if it was a little dirty. ‘You know, the way you hold your breath for just a second when you are given something little and beautiful, in the immediate anticipation of losing it. Which – of course – you will.’ She said this with a flippant wave of her hand. ‘You can’t cling on to anything in this life; money, possessions, other people, even the cherry blossoms dry up and drop away. Loving anything is bound to the pain of losing it. Which is why clinging causes suffering.’

‘You should write that on a bumper sticker.’

‘Are you listening?’

‘Mostly,’ Jesse said. ‘I just don’t see what this has to do with me.’ His sister rolled her eyes.

That was the last night he ever spent with her. The last conversation they had in person. He would realize this later – with a wrench of pain. She had returned from university the previous week and whipped off a patterned scarf to reveal her stunningly bald head. She’d shaved off her thick waist-length locks, and with them the clutching spectres of unhealthy attachments, her own vanity and the hopes of her weary parents.