Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

She loved watching when the planet rolled in front of the sun, and the cities began to blaze against its shadowed face. Through their telescope, she could pick out London and Lagos and the whole of the east coast of America through a recognisable lacework of roads. By day, the cities were cement-coloured smudges against the land, indistinguishable from the grey-green of suburbs and countryside, but, at night, humanity shouted its existence at the stars. Poppy could tell the population density from the sodium orange belts of light that made up roads, country borders and interstate boundaries. Japanese cities burned blue-green, and a bright sprawl of mercury vapour lamps illuminated the streets along the black hollow of Tokyo Bay. Their commander pointed out Mecca, a patch of light against a jet desert, and the interstate highway that lanced across el Paso. All the places she would never go.

‘No wonder there’s global warming,’ Juno said that night, leaning into the window to take a photograph, ‘when you look at all this. There are so many people. It’s so bright.’

‘I can still see London,’ said Poppy.

‘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?

Chapter 14 ELIOT

^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.