Patrick Ness - The New World

‘Will we be low enough?’ my mother yells.

I dial through a few more screens and projected landing arcs. ‘It’ll be close.’

The ship gives a huge jolt.

And then there’s an eerie quiet.

‘We’ve lost the engines,’ my mother says. ‘The vents never opened. The fire choked out.’ She turns to me. ‘We’re gliding in. Program me a flightpath and hold on tight.’

I dial quickly through a few more screens, locking in a landing arc into what I’m hoping will be a nice soft swamp.

My mother pulls the manual controls hard with her fists, lining up her screen with the path I’ve laid out. Out the portholes I can see the ground far too clearly now, treetops getting closer and closer below us.

‘Mum?’ I say, watching as we get lower in the sky.

‘Hang on!’ she says.

‘MUM!’

And we hit.

***

‘Happy birthday!’ they shouted on the big day, ambushing me at breakfast with the least surprising surprise party in the history of the universe.

‘Thanks,’ I mumbled.

We’d left the convoy three months earlier, watching it blink out of sight behind us as we sped away fast, fast, fast. We were still eight weeks away from the new planet, eight long weeks in a ship that was beginning to smell a bit, no matter how much the air got filtered.

‘Presents!’ my father said, sweeping his hand over the wrapped boxes on the table.

‘You could at least try to look pleased, Viola,’ my mother said.

‘Thanks,’ I said again, a bit louder. I opened the first present, a new pair of boots, meant for hiking through rough terrain, completely the wrong colour, but I made sort of fake thankful sounds for them anyway.

I opened the second.

‘Binos,’ my father said as I took them out. ‘Your mother had them upgraded by Eddie, the engineer on the Alpha before we left. These do things you wouldn’t even believe. Night vision, in-screen zoom...’

I looked through them and found a giant version of my father’s left eye looking back at me.

‘She’s smiling,’ my father said and his own giant grin filled the binos.

‘I am not ,’ I said.

My mother left the room and came back with my favourite breakfast, a stack of pancakes, this time with thirteen motion-activated fibre-optic lights glittering on the top. They sang me the song, and it took four goes moving my hands before I got all the lights to go off.

‘What’d you wish for?’ my father asked.

‘If you tell,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t come true.’

‘Well, we’re not turning the ship around,’ my mother said, ‘so I hope it wasn’t that.’

‘Hope!’ my father said, too loud, covering up my mother’s words with forced enthusiasm. ‘That’s what we should all wish for. Hope!’

I frowned because there was that word again.

‘We brought this out, too,’ my father said, touching Bradley’s still-wrapped present. ‘Just in case you wanted to open it now.’

I looked at my parents’ faces, my father bright and happy, my mother annoyed with all my moaning but trying to make me have a good birthday anyway. And for a brief second, I saw their worry about me, too.

Their worry that I didn’t seem to have any hope at all.

I looked at Bradley’s present. A light against the darkness , he’d said.

‘He said it was for when we got there,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait until then.’

***

The sound when we crash is so loud it’s almost impossible.

The ship smashes through trees, snapping them into bits, and then hits the ground with a jolt so violent I knock my head against the control panel and pain rips through it but I’m still awake, awake enough to hear the ship start to break apart, awake enough to hear every crash and snap and grind as we carve out a long ditch through the swamp, awake as the ship rolls over again and again, which can only mean the wings have broken off, and everything in the cabin falls to the ceiling and back down again and then there’s an actual crack in the structure of the cockpit and water rushes in from the swamp but then we’re rolling again-

And we’re slowing-

The roll is slowing down-

The grinding of metal is deafening and the main lights cut off as we take another roll, replaced immediately by the quivery battery lights-

And the roll keeps slowing-

Slowing until-

It stops.

And I’m still breathing. My head is spinning and aching and I’m hanging almost upside down from my buckle in my seat.

But I’m breathing.

‘Mum?’ I say, looking down and around. ‘ Mum? ’

‘Viola?’ I hear.

‘Mum?’ I twist round to where her seat should be-

But it’s not there-

I twist round some more-

And there she is, resting against the ceiling, her chair ripped from the floor-

And the way she’s lying there-

The way she’s lying there broken -

‘Viola?’ she says again.

And the way she says it makes my chest grip tight as a fist.

No , I think. No .

And I start the struggle to get out of my chair to get to her.

***

‘Big day tomorrow, Skipper,’ my dad said, coming into the engine room, where I was replacing tubes of coolant, one of about a million chores they’d come up with in the past five months to keep me busy. ‘We’ll finally be entering orbit.’

I clicked in the last coolant tube. ‘Terrific.’

He paused. ‘I know this hasn’t been easy for you, Viola.’

‘Why do you care if it wasn’t?’ I said. ‘I didn’t have any say in the matter.’

He came closer. ‘Okay, what are you really frightened of, Viola?’ he said, and it’s so exactly the question Bradley asked me that I look back at him. ‘Is it what we could find there? Or is it just that it’s change?’

I sighed heavily. ‘No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky’s too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?’

‘And what if the air tastes of honey? What if there’s so much food we all get too fat? What if the sky is so beautiful we don’t get any work done because we’re all looking at it too much?’

I turned and closed up the coolant tube cases. ‘But what if it isn’t?’

‘But what if it is?’

‘What if it isn’t? ’

‘What if it is? ’

‘Yeah, this is getting us somewhere.’

‘Haven’t we raised you to be hopeful?’ he said. ‘Wasn’t that the whole point of your great-grandmother agreeing to be a caretaker on this ship, so that one day you could have a better life? She was full of hope. Your mum and I are full of hope.’ He was close enough now for a hug, if I wanted it. ‘Why can’t you share some of that?’

And he was looking so caring, so worried, that how could I tell him? How could I tell him how much I hate even the sound of the word?

Hope. That’s all anyone ever talked about on the convoy, especially as we got closer. Hope, hope, hope.

As in, ‘I hope the weather’s good.’ This from people who’d never actually experienced weather except in immersive vids.

Or, ‘I hope there’s interesting wildlife.’ From people who’d only ever met Scampus and Bumpus, the ship’s cats on the Delta. 10,000 frozen sheep and cow embryos didn’t count.

Or, ‘I hope the natives are friendly.’ This always said with a laugh because there aren’t supposed to be any natives, at least according to the deep space probes.

Everybody was hoping for something, talking about our new life to come and all that they hoped from it. Fresh air, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Real gravity, instead of the fake kind that broke every now and then (even though no one over fifteen would admit that it was actually really fun when it did). All the wide open spaces we’d have, all the new people we’d meet when we woke them up, ignoring completely what happened to the original settlers, super-confident that we were so much better equipped that nothing bad could possibly happen to us.