Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

They planned the journey to Terra-Two and when they named the six of us how could we say no? We were young. They had hauled us from obscurity to hurl us at the stars, and we were dizzied by shallow fantasies of being the first, of leaving our footprints on the land, pushing our flag down into the dirt, giving it a name, dividing and taming it.

Did we forget about the darkness? Did we shrug off the loneliness and the labour? Did we regret? Of course we did.

We have been told that Terra-Two is waiting for us, and perhaps it still is. Perhaps the sand has washed up on the shores in quiet anticipation of the day we set our soles dancing across it.

Some nights we ask ourselves why we chose to leave everything behind. We used to think we had many reasons, but – really – there is only one.

Chapter 1 JESSE

^2004–2012

HE HAD DEVELOPED THE habit of tapping his thumb against the tips of his fingers. The index first, three, four, five again and again, perfected to a quick, quiet art. He had read online that it was a test of neurological agility. When the neurons in his brain began to pop out like lightbulbs he would no longer be able to perform this minor feat. Nor would he be able to roll a two pence coin over his knuckles forward and then back in one fluid motion so the penny slid across his lissom hands – another skill mastered over years of staring out the window during tutorials, watching blossoms fall and thinking about death.

Jesse thought about death a lot, in the beginning, with the same detached curiosity roused by the sight of a car accident. He had been told that he would die before he turned twenty.

During a trip to Indonesia, a medicine man had taken his sister’s hand and told her she would fall sick but not leave this Earth, and then stared down at the lines of Jesse’s own palm and said that in nine years he would.

It was only after his sister’s preternatural recovery from cerebral malaria that Jesse began to give some thought to how he might die. He’d been eleven, then. Young and relatively healthy, it was unlikely to be an accident of genetics or something insidious and tragic like leukaemia. He hoped that, when death came, it would be quick as a knife. Something as dramatic as a car accident or gunshot wound seemed, to him, romantic but unlikely. Jesse believed that if anything was going to kill him it would be his brain. A tumour, an aneurysm, a sudden unexplained blow to the back of the head.

Whenever his mother or the family paediatrician intervened – promising that he was healthy and unlikely to die – he would remember the sight of his sister’s green eyes flying open in that humid hospital room just after the doctors had told his parents there was nothing more they could do.

Jesse sat in class, tapping his fingers and imagining the build-up of intracranial pressure. His anxious, overactive brain swelling like a sponge against the cage of his skull. By the time his family left Indonesia and returned to London, life was like a fickle lover, leaving him guessing and sick and wanting more time.

A few more years was not enough. He might never go to Argentina, never have sex, never ride in an open-top convertible along the California coastline with the wind in his hair and shadows at his back. All these things had never been his and yet he felt as if they’d been taken from him. The future, the freedom to hope for it.

His suffering – made ineffably worse by the fact that no one believed him – grew so bad that by age thirteen he was a morbid recluse. He spun away from his classmates like a satellite in a doomed orbit. Lay in bed, tallying all the time he had already lost, too tired to get up, to cut his nails, to get dressed. His older sister would stand over his bed in her crumpled school uniform and shout, ‘Some people have real problems, you know.’

But when applications to the Off-World Colonization Project opened up, Jesse saw his salvation.