Temi Oh - Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘Astrid!’ she yelled, her voice threatening tears.

‘Juno?’ came a muffled reply. She heard it, or she thought she heard it, from behind the heavy door of the engine room.

Juno found her twin hugging her knees in the corner, half-hidden behind a bundle of pipes and wires. ‘Astrid?’

‘Yeah…’ Astrid’s voice was thick, drowned by the shriek of an exhaust fan. Juno fumbled for the light switch but her fingers found nothing, so when the door slammed shut behind her, she could only see by the blinking glow of the computer displays in the corner, and the quicksilver flashes of light reflected off the steel blades of a fan.

‘I couldn’t find you.’ Juno groped around in the darkness for Astrid, until her fingers caught between the soft folds of her cardigan. ‘I thought… I thought…’ The thought was too horrible.

‘I just wanted to be alone for a bit,’ Astrid said. ‘I’m just grateful I made it.’ Juno put her head in her sister’s lap. And as she did so, she felt an inward release of pressure. The feeling of being home.

Juno and Astrid had been born three and a half weeks early. Their mother had told them the story only once, described the trauma she had suffered, the blood loss. The isolating terror of that night. And when the sun rose, their mother, delirious with exhaustion, had gazed at them – these keening blue creatures that the doctors had ripped from her – and said to their father, ‘We can’t undo it now.’ Words that had frightened Juno for years. Her mother had been saying that she would never not be a mother. That when she laid eyes on the twins, the permanence of her new status hit her with a sudden and brutal force. She would be their mother until she died and even after.

‘Did we make a mistake?’ Juno asked. Astrid was making quick sharp gasping sounds, her shoulders shuddering. ‘Are you crying?’ Juno strained to discern her sister’s face in the darkness. Her cheeks glistened. She nodded.

‘Do you think we made a mistake?’ Juno ventured again.

Astrid shook her head.

‘Are you homesick?’

Astrid shook her head again.

JESSE

13.05.12

UNLIKE OTHER MEMBERS OF the crew, he had not spent as much time training in a mock-up of the ship. He didn’t already know where everything was and no one had the patience to help him. So Jesse spent most of the afternoon exploring on his own. There were three main decks; the crew’s living quarters and bathroom were in the middle, while the seniors resided on the top deck near the command module. Harry and Solomon Sheppard were already there when Jesse reached it, but he shivered with excitement nonetheless. The control deck was the glittering nucleus of the ship, it was filled with light, dazzling star-maps and spinning astrolabes, the screens of a dozen monitors reeling off endless dizzying scrolls of data. It was a fantasy just standing here. Jesse watched for a moment as Harry took it all in, stroking the leather-backed commander’s chair and the pilot’s seat beside it, as if he, himself, could not believe his luck.

‘It begins today,’ Solomon Sheppard said with a smile.

Jesse had grown up wondering how it felt to be people like Harrison Bellgrave. Surely boys like Harry believed that greatness was their birthright. Strode through life, their hands open for the Oscar, the medals, the knighthood, while people like Jesse crouched in their shadow. The awkward interloper.

‘Ready to feel the burn,’ Harry joked to their commander. Now that they’d arrived on the Damocles , Harry and Commander Sheppard would perform the engine burn that would boost them out of Earth’s orbit. Jesse watched the scene now, with some bitterness.

Like Harry and a large number of students at Dalton, Jesse had fought to be accepted on the pilot stream in his fourth year, when they choose specialisms. The pilot stream students trained in a separate facility, miles from Dalton, where they could practise flying for hours a day. Perhaps because of this separation, and because it was widely understood that the deputy commander would be chosen from this gifted group, the stream took on a glittering mystique, and in reverent tones was referred to as ‘Command School’. Jesse himself had spent all of two weeks in Command School. He’d fought against the teachers at every turn. He had not wanted to cut his hair short, like the rest of the Command School students with their androgynous buzzcuts – the research scientists performed EEGs while the students flew and it was easier to measure their brain’s electrical activity when they didn’t have long locks of hair on their heads. He’d hated the loneliness of it, twelve-hour days locked in damp simulation cubicles, flying through virtual space for so long that during his brief trips outside he became fixated by the sight of the sun as if he’d stolen a glance at the face of God.

Jesse was already behind, even that first week. Many of the students, like Harry, had already logged years of private flying lessons on their families’ estates, or at their town’s aerodrome. But Jesse struggled with every test and knew that if his average kept dropping he would be thrown out of Dalton by November half-term. So he placed a request to switch to the least competitive stream: hydroponics. Six months spent baking under the dome of the greenhouse, or bent over trays of static solution cultures, and his score went up. It turned out that Jesse had a knack for working with living things. But he could not stifle the sting of regret, or the shame of failure.

In the end, his defection from Command School had still only earned him a place on the backup crew.

‘Jesse Solloway.’ Jesse was startled by the German accent of their doctor. For a second, he wondered if he was in trouble, if he had no right to be on the control deck. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you are just the person I’ve been looking for. Can you do something for me?’

She wanted him to take a box of the dead girl’s things down to the cargo bay, and Jesse realized, from her hushed tones, that she wanted him to keep it a secret.

She was everywhere, the dead girl. Not more than twenty-four hours after it had happened and her dark presence already permeated the ship, stood between Jesse and the rest of the crew, lingered at the end of every unfinished sentence. Her name, ARA SHAH, was embossed on the door to the girls’ cabin, above Astrid’s. Her spacesuit was boxed up next to theirs in the equipment bay, a hard shell custom-made for her dimensions.

Jesse could think of no good reason to object, and soon he found himself hauling the crate down the hatch to the lower deck, where the whirring of machines was louder and the fluorescent lights hissed like wasps. He held the barcode on the box against the scanner and the monitor flashed green. ‘EARTH CARGO’, it read, ‘miscellaneous/personal effects/SHAH, ARA.’ Jesse knew that this box, like many of the crew’s belongings, had been sent up to the Damocles four months ago with the final supply shuttle. She would have been alive back then. Her name on the screen sent a little thrill of curiosity through him, and as he pushed inside the dully lit room, Jesse gave in to it and pried the box open.

Although most of her clothes were vacuum-packed, the box was filled with the powdery, fresh smell that Jesse associated with the female dormitory at Dalton. The faint aroma of orange blossom and jasmine. It was like a time-capsule of a teenage girl. A box of souvenir plectrums printed with the Union Jack, a string of Mardi Gras beads, an ornate hairbrush with strands of thick black hair twisted in its teeth, crushed Chinese lanterns and Polaroids. One of Eliot Liston asleep and splayed atop a mountain range of rumpled duvets. Another one of her own young self, fingers pressed against a fretboard, sitting on the refectory table. Jesse thought he remembered the incident. One lunchtime Ara and her friends had surprised onlookers with an impromptu performance of ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’, which earned them a standing ovation. At the time, Jesse had been quietly annoyed, but now he realized that he’d only been jealous. Jealous of the self-assured way that Ara grabbed at the world, with a foolhardy optimism. Her class believed that if she was not chosen for the Beta she would rise to fame in some other way, as a musician or a striking and strange runway model. She had talent and intelligence, and the unwavering love of Eliot Liston in one of those freak school romances that survived more than a summer. To Jesse, she’d seemed to have everything.