Temi Oh - Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

Out the window, it had gone from a sunny day to complete blackness. Over her headset, mission control said, ‘Good luck and Godspeed.’

SHE WOULD PROBABLY NEVER be weightless again, Juno realized with an odd disappointment as she looked for the Damocles through the window. Their little shuttle was due to dock with the imposing ship in thirty minutes and as they approached Juno could start to feel the heaviness of its artificial gravity.

Like other members of the Beta, she had trained for 200 hours in the Weightless environment Training Facility – a fifteen-metre-deep pool in which scaled-down mock-ups of the Damocles and the Congreve were sunk. Those exhausting days meant that, now, the Beta were expected to take to weightlessness as instinctively as creatures designed for the sky.

But true weightlessness was different from swimming. Although Juno’s clothes clung and floated around her chest in the same way, there was no real sense of up or down . No pool floor beneath or light refracting above. After a while in the orbiter, her sense of balance disappeared. There was no need for it. She unstrapped from her seat and found that she already knew how to move around the cramped space, the exact right angles to push off surfaces, the amount of force to apply to her weightless limbs. Poppy clapped as Astrid and Jesse turned gleeful somersaults in the air.

‘There she is,’ Commander Sheppard said, as Juno turned to see the Damocles rising like a shard of glass out of the shadow of the Earth. It was a strange shape, a long shining central truss banded by three torus decks – which looked like aluminium doughnuts – with no wings or rudders, nothing to suggest flight. It was not streamlined like their shuttle, because it did not need to drill against friction to escape Earth’s atmosphere. It had been assembled in orbit over the past five years – a gradual process that all astronaut candidates for the Beta had followed with hopeful interest, dreaming of making it their home, of walking the round decks or harvesting crops in the glassy greenhouse that ran through its spine.

Perhaps that was why, as she spotted the glinting vessel, Juno shivered with recognition. She herself had been excited every time a new module had been built, launched into orbit and locked by skilled engineers onto the central truss. She had bought a kit and built her own model of the Damocles to mount on the desk in her bedroom at Dalton, a model with real decks that spun around tiny crawl-spokes, with hollow little bridges running between them all. She had even coloured her own Union Jack with red and blue gel pens and tacked it onto the round control module that protruded from the upper deck.

However, she suspected her recognition ran a lot deeper than a scale model or simulation mock-ups. She wanted to believe that the reason she felt a twinge of closure as they locked on to the giant vessel was because it was her home.

As they edged closer to it, gravity tugged at the crew. Juno’s limbs grew heavier and the fluids drained from her face. The congested flu-like feeling that being weightless induced in her sinuses began to clear. The Damocles was equipped with two gravity-dromes that emitted 1g of fictitious force to stop their bones from crumbling and their muscles from atrophying during the long-haul journey.

When they finally docked, Juno was one of the last to climb out and when she did she felt like a swimmer surfacing, crawling back onto land. Her bones were made of iron, her head a millstone. As she stepped out of the airlock and onto the craft the muscles in her thighs began to tremble. Her first view of the ship was glittering with stars, and then her vision blackened and the floor smacked the side of her body.

JUNO AWOKE FEELING SPACESICK, shaken to her core by an unfamiliar dread. Had she made a mistake? She had made a mistake. In the window, Earth was bright as a marble and tumbling from view.

‘Do you know where you are?’

Juno looked up to see a pair of steely blue eyes. ‘Dr Golinsky?’ she heard herself say.

‘You must have blacked out,’ the doctor said. ‘No, don’t try to get up just yet.’ It took a second for the room to come into focus. Juno lifted her head and felt the bed sway beneath her, so she lay back down.

The doctor had taken off her spacesuit and changed into uniform: navy overalls and a lab coat. Eliot was also in his uniform overalls, Juno noticed. He was eye-level with her, curled up on the opposite gurney, his face glistening with sweat.

‘Are you okay?’ Juno asked. Before he could reply he convulsed and retched into the bucket beside his bed. The air filled with the sharp tang of vomit.

‘Spacesick,’ Dr Golinsky said. ‘It should wear off soon, now that we’re back in 1g. I’d prefer not to give him an anti-emetic for it – it’s better to let him adjust to the new acceleration. You can call me Fae from now on. Brits find it easier. Are you okay to sit up?’

Juno ignored the trembling in her biceps and made a second attempt to lift herself up onto her forearms. ‘It seems like low blood sugar,’ the doctor said, emptying a sachet of pink powder into a glass of water and giving it a quick stir. Juno stared at the sparkling liquid, then gulped it down.

‘Mmm… strawberry,’ she murmured. The sugar was a delight on her tongue.

‘Yes, that’s probably it.’ Fae made a quick scribble on her clipboard. ‘Has this ever happened before?’

‘No,’ Juno lied.

‘You can stay here for a while to rest,’ the doctor said, ‘or maybe you want to nap in your cabin?’

Juno didn’t want to sleep. ‘Where is Astrid?’ she asked.

‘Probably in the crew module,’ said Fae, already ticking off notes on another page. ‘There’ll be a lot to do for the next few days. We’ve worked out a rota, we’ll discuss it tonight. I’ll go and tell Commander Sheppard that all his crew are nominal.’

“ ‘Nominal”,’ Eliot groaned, and spat into his bucket.

‘You’ll be all right,’ Fae said. ‘You just have to find your space legs.’ A joke, Juno recognized. Eliot ignored her.

‘Do you know where Astrid is?’ Juno asked again.

‘I don’t know where anyone is.’ He rolled over on his back and shielded his eyes from the lights.

‘Poor thing,’ murmured Fae as she left the room. ‘There’s always one.’

‘Actually, one-third of astronauts suffer from some form of space adaptation sickness,’ Eliot said, ‘for her information. It’s not just me… and Juno, when you see Harry tell him to go fuck himself.’ Juno winced as she remembered the comments that Harry had made to him that morning over breakfast.

The small windowless room was claustrophobic and the acrid smell of sick made Juno’s stomach roil. She stepped unsteadily off the bed, her head still swimmy and light, and followed Fae out.

It took a moment for Juno to figure out where she was based on the mental map she had of the vessel. She had just left the infirmary, which was on the upper deck. She had to walk all the way around the circular corridor to get her bearings. To her left were four cabins with the names of the senior crew printed on the doors:

Commander Solomon Sheppard – Commander/Pilot

Igor Bovarin – Flight Engineer/Educator

Dr Friederike Golinsky – Flight Surgeon/Educator

Dr Cai Tsang – Botanist/Hydroponics Expert

That last room was empty, and although a pile of bleached white sheets had been left on the bed, no one had taken the time to strip the plastic off the mattress yet.

The kitchen was filled with sealed boxes, and although the counters were gleaming and untouched, particles of dust glittered in the air and the place smelt unfamiliar.