Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘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.