Temi Oh - Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘It looks like a neuron,’ Juno said, jostling for the eyepiece. Poppy knew what she meant. The glowing nucleus branching off in glittering interlocking trails of light. The Thames slit a dark line through the city and opened like an inky mouth at the estuary.

‘Do you think they can still see us?’

‘Not likely,’ Juno said, shrugging, ‘not without a telescope.’

Viewed from the side, Poppy could see the opalescent layers of the planet’s atmosphere. It looked as delicate as a bubble and yet it kept the world beneath them alive. It trapped in heat, it set fire to rogue asteroids on course for civilization and protected the life below from cosmic radiation. For a few days, their course had been on the right latitude for Poppy to see streams of charged particles sucked into the Earth’s magnetic field. They smashed into atoms in the upper atmosphere and excited electrons. The Northern Lights. Whenever she gazed at them, she thought about what a great thing it was to be alive right at that moment.

There were people on Earth squinting through telescopes and following the progress of the Damocles through the sky. Is my mother one of them? Poppy wondered sometimes. Her mother was the only one she was leaving behind. Just weeks into their mission and she only communicated with her daughter in cryptic emails, hyperlinked articles that Poppy couldn’t always open, photographs of horoscopes cut out from the local newspaper or screenshots from websites. Poppy never knew how to reply. She always wondered if her mother scoured the internet for the predictions she knew were relevant – perhaps that was why the most recent had read:

Virgo: Jupiter continues to transit your solar ninth house. Under this influence, you may have opportunities to travel, study abroad and expand your horizons.

Whenever she opened a link to another horoscope, Poppy couldn’t figure out if she was confused or disappointed. She had been glad to leave her mother behind, and every time she was glad she was also guilty.

Dear Poppy, this year eclipses will fall into your solar fourth and tenth houses and third and ninth houses. The sun is setting fast. Take a stand against disillusion. Good things can last.

Did she think that Poppy would understand her, now that they had the stars in common?

03.06.12

ELIOT KEPT THINKING ABOUT Cai’s life on Mars. The man had arrived in his own shuttle, a week earlier, worn out by his journey. They’d all stood by the hatch grinning, and Poppy had painted a banner saying ‘Welcome’. As the hatch opened they all clapped, but Cai greeted the crew with a narrow-eyed snarl, so exhausted by the ship’s gravity that he slumped against the airlock wall. He was in his fifties and had spent most of his life on Mars, talking to computer monitors and plants. He had engineered anaerobic cacti that flourished in the arid craters of that planet, tended to oxygen gardens and landscaped botanical parks. He’d spent so long on Elysium Mons that most of his equipment was still stained the haematic red of the soil. Eliot had heard Igor say that they had been lucky to recruit him for this mission. Cai had been coming to end of his tenure at the International Laboratory and was looking to discover, for himself, what alien plant life blossomed in the soil of Terra-Two.

Years spent hunched in the low gravity of Mars had altered him forever, stretched his bones long and thin. He stood, now, at almost seven feet, his femurs and spine grossly elongated but brittle as a bird’s. He could barely stand in the 1g force on most of the ship and preferred to spend his time in the greenhouse, where the gravity was 60 per cent that of the Earth’s.

Cai’s arrival had been exciting for the Beta crew for all of five minutes. He spoke little, rarely turned up to dinner and when he did he was sullen and ornery, his mouth turned down as if he was sucking on something sour. ‘Poorly socialized’ was the phrase that Eliot had heard Fae whisper.

Eliot wondered what it had been like to be alone for that long. He wanted to ask him, but was nervous about approaching the older man. In between the arrival and departure of various international expeditions, Cai had manned the Mars laboratory alone, living on the same cycle of freeze-dried meals and thumbing through the same old paperbacks abandoned in the library.

The reporters on Earth had regularly posed that same question to all of the members of the Beta: how do you cope with the isolation on board the ship? They didn’t know that, in some ways, this was the least alone Eliot had been his whole life. Sharing a room with other boys, the constant chatter that rumbled through the walls from morning bell until night, the regular keening of various life-support machines. Everything was shared, the one-size-fits-all jumpsuits that they all took turns scrubbing and then posting into their uniform cubbyholes on the lower deck, the bedsheets and most of the food. The board games donated by various charities and the vast library of TV shows and movies and books stored in the ship’s databank.

He’d said to the reporters, ‘I’m handling the loneliness just fine.’ But he never mentioned the other kind of loneliness that was eating him like a cancer; the constant phantom-limb pain of grief over Ara’s death. He was certain that everyone could see his suffering and was wincing at the sight of it. So most of the time Eliot communicated with the rest of the crew from behind the lens of a camera, which made them smile dumbly at him and stare straight through.

What was Mars like? he wondered. Was the ground soft like sand underfoot, or was it cracked as skin and stone-hard?

Some months, Cai had been the only person on the entire planet.

‘How did you fight the loneliness?’ Eliot finally summoned the courage to ask him one evening after dinner.

Cai did not look up. ‘Are you filming me?’ he asked, tipping heaped teaspoons of sugar into his coffee.

‘Not yet,’ Poppy said, turning to Eliot just to double check the light on the side of his camera. Then she looked back at Cai and asked, ‘How can you drink that stuff? It tastes as if it was made in a lab. It tastes like lighter fluid.’

‘Is lighter fluid a popular beverage in England?’ Cai asked, his mouth curling a little.

Poppy and Eliot had been instructed, by a few producers at the Interplanetary Channel, to downlink more footage of the elusive new astronaut.

‘Everybody has their drug of choice,’ Cai said. His nervous fingers drew a circle around the rim of his cup. Eliot noticed that they were stained the acid-green of the fertilizer he handled all day. ‘Though,’ Cai continued, ‘spend as long as I have in space and you’ll discover that choice really has very little to do with it.’ Finally, he turned to the camera with his grey eyes. ‘Put that thing down, would you?’

Eliot obliged.

‘Now, what did you ask me?’ Cai asked.

‘About what?’

‘About the loneliness?’

Blood flooded Eliot’s cheeks. He hadn’t realized that he’d asked the question out loud. ‘Nothing,’ he said. Cai simply stared at him, his stained fingers making hollow tapping sounds on the side of his cup.

‘I mean,’ Poppy said, to fill the silence, looking between the two men, ‘you haven’t set foot on Earth for over thirty years.’

‘That’s correct,’ Cai said.

‘Is there something you miss the most?’ she asked.

The scientist took a moment to think and then said, ‘Nothing at all. You know, there is nothing about this life that does not suit me. There were 2.7 billion people on Earth the year I was born and now there are 7 billion. Sometimes I used to lie awake at night and think about all the people in the world. Jumbled hive of consciousness, trillions of busy multiplying cells. It was claustrophobic. There is no frontier left to discover, down there. Almost every inch of the Earth has been trodden under a million feet. Photographed hundreds of thousands of times. But,’ and he closed his eyes, ‘to be alone is divine. To trek through lightless craters, leave the first and sole footprints on Martian mountains. Tear through the hard vacuum of space unfettered by the sickly mass of humanity we left behind.’ He leant forward and caught Eliot’s gaze. ‘There is only yourself, first and last. Meet him with courage, meet him with gladness. There is only one. There is love to be found. Adventure to be had.’