Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

Years spent hunched in the low gravity of Mars had altered him forever, stretched his bones long and thin. He stood, now, at almost seven feet, his femurs and spine grossly elongated but brittle as a bird’s. He could barely stand in the 1g force on most of the ship and preferred to spend his time in the greenhouse, where the gravity was 60 per cent that of the Earth’s.

Cai’s arrival had been exciting for the Beta crew for all of five minutes. He spoke little, rarely turned up to dinner and when he did he was sullen and ornery, his mouth turned down as if he was sucking on something sour. ‘Poorly socialized’ was the phrase that Eliot had heard Fae whisper.

Eliot wondered what it had been like to be alone for that long. He wanted to ask him, but was nervous about approaching the older man. In between the arrival and departure of various international expeditions, Cai had manned the Mars laboratory alone, living on the same cycle of freeze-dried meals and thumbing through the same old paperbacks abandoned in the library.

The reporters on Earth had regularly posed that same question to all of the members of the Beta: how do you cope with the isolation on board the ship? They didn’t know that, in some ways, this was the least alone Eliot had been his whole life. Sharing a room with other boys, the constant chatter that rumbled through the walls from morning bell until night, the regular keening of various life-support machines. Everything was shared, the one-size-fits-all jumpsuits that they all took turns scrubbing and then posting into their uniform cubbyholes on the lower deck, the bedsheets and most of the food. The board games donated by various charities and the vast library of TV shows and movies and books stored in the ship’s databank.

He’d said to the reporters, ‘I’m handling the loneliness just fine.’ But he never mentioned the other kind of loneliness that was eating him like a cancer; the constant phantom-limb pain of grief over Ara’s death. He was certain that everyone could see his suffering and was wincing at the sight of it. So most of the time Eliot communicated with the rest of the crew from behind the lens of a camera, which made them smile dumbly at him and stare straight through.

What was Mars like? he wondered. Was the ground soft like sand underfoot, or was it cracked as skin and stone-hard?

Some months, Cai had been the only person on the entire planet.

‘How did you fight the loneliness?’ Eliot finally summoned the courage to ask him one evening after dinner.

Cai did not look up. ‘Are you filming me?’ he asked, tipping heaped teaspoons of sugar into his coffee.

‘Not yet,’ Poppy said, turning to Eliot just to double check the light on the side of his camera. Then she looked back at Cai and asked, ‘How can you drink that stuff? It tastes as if it was made in a lab. It tastes like lighter fluid.’

‘Is lighter fluid a popular beverage in England?’ Cai asked, his mouth curling a little.

Poppy and Eliot had been instructed, by a few producers at the Interplanetary Channel, to downlink more footage of the elusive new astronaut.

‘Everybody has their drug of choice,’ Cai said. His nervous fingers drew a circle around the rim of his cup. Eliot noticed that they were stained the acid-green of the fertilizer he handled all day. ‘Though,’ Cai continued, ‘spend as long as I have in space and you’ll discover that choice really has very little to do with it.’ Finally, he turned to the camera with his grey eyes. ‘Put that thing down, would you?’

Eliot obliged.

‘Now, what did you ask me?’ Cai asked.

‘About what?’

‘About the loneliness?’

Blood flooded Eliot’s cheeks. He hadn’t realized that he’d asked the question out loud. ‘Nothing,’ he said. Cai simply stared at him, his stained fingers making hollow tapping sounds on the side of his cup.

‘I mean,’ Poppy said, to fill the silence, looking between the two men, ‘you haven’t set foot on Earth for over thirty years.’

‘That’s correct,’ Cai said.

‘Is there something you miss the most?’ she asked.