Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘For all of it.’ Poppy’s pale fingers were trembling. ‘This whole thing has happened so quickly. It feels like yesterday that we were selected and now here we are. Leaving tomorrow. I’m not ready for it, or to spend twenty-three years travelling to a planet that no one has ever been to. And the other stuff too… never having children of my own, and—’

‘Look,’ Astrid interrupted, ‘you just have cold feet. That’s all.’

‘Twenty-three years, Astrid.’ Poppy’s eyes widened as if she could see every hour they would surrender to the darkness. ‘And—’ she lowered her voice. ‘Do you always believe them, about Terra-Two?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That it will be a paradise. That it’s as beautiful as they say it is. Like the pictures.’

‘Of course, I do. W-why wouldn’t I?’

‘I don’t know.’ Poppy shrugged, ‘I imagine reaching it sometimes and finding that it’s as scarred and desolate as the face of the moon. I think I’d die of disappointment.’

‘You just have cold feet,’ Astrid said again, gripping Poppy’s arm, willing her to stop.

‘Do I?’ she asked.

‘I believe everything,’ Astrid said. ‘This is an amazing adventure, and we’re the first. Like Armstrong and the moon or Igor and Mars. And it will go by quickly. All the years. Like this –’ She snapped her fingers.

They both looked up. They’d only just noticed the sound of the rain, the heavy way it was pounding the copper roof of the refectory. Behind Poppy was a glass wall, and a door leading to the courtyard. The sky was twice as bright as it had been just five minutes ago, and the dawn made the clouds light up in peach and bruise-purple. Astrid had never seen rain like it before, the kind that reflected the sun and filled the air with a flaxen light. She might even have called it beautiful if the word hadn’t curdled in her stomach.

‘That’s why you deserve to go,’ Poppy said, turning back. ‘You and your sister and Ara. The boys. They made a mistake with me.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘No…’ She lowered her eyes, ‘It’s true. I came because I was running away. And… you want to know something?’

‘What?’ asked Astrid.

‘Moy sekret,’ she said. Astrid recognized the Russian from her GCSE classes. Poppy had an irritating habit of flaunting her language skills at inappropriate times. ‘I lied in the personality tests.’

Astrid gazed at her in confusion.

‘It’s quite simple, actually,’ Poppy continued, ‘they have specific select-out and select-in criteria. You have to be sociable enough to thrive as a member of a multi-disciplinary team, but introverted enough to do well in the isolated environment of outer space, so you—’

‘It’s not possible to cheat those tests,’ Astrid said. ‘They control for lying. Don’t you think everyone lies? Or tries to? No one’s going to say they’re frightened of the dark or enclosed spaces. Everyone ticks “strongly agree” when they read “I function well in a team.” But they chose you for a reason. You’re so good at—’ Astrid fumbled for a moment. ‘…communication. And… public relations. The crowds love you. You wouldn’t have made it through if they didn’t know you were right for this mission, Poppy.’

Poppy looked up again at her friend with desperate eyes. ‘You think?’ she almost pleaded.

‘Of course.’

Poppy’s talent with languages had long made her the envy of the other students at Dalton. As part of their training, all astronaut candidates were required to display some proficiency in Russian, as the UKSA had strong links with the Russian Space Agency, Roscocosmos. As her classmates took their first clumsy halting steps into the language, Poppy was reading Анна Каренина and conducting happy conversations with their engineering teacher. Although she scored below average in almost every other subject, Poppy had excelled in computer science and robotics because she picked up programming languages with the ease of a stamp collector.

Nevertheless, everyone suspected, uncharitably, that the real reason Poppy had been selected for the Beta over so many other competent candidates was because of her good looks. Poppy’s role, as Head of Communications, was the most public-facing of the crew. And her face was a delight. Unnaturally symmetrical. Titian hair drawn down her porcelain forehead into a delicate widow’s peak. Cartilage of her nose curved exquisitely upwards. Every week for twenty-three years, her role was to appear on the TV and computer screens of children all over the world, explaining thermodynamics and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion in twenty different languages.

‘And you have doubts too, sometimes?’ Poppy asked.

‘Sure,’ Astrid lied, ‘sometimes.’