Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

The scientist took a moment to think and then said, ‘Nothing at all. You know, there is nothing about this life that does not suit me. There were 2.7 billion people on Earth the year I was born and now there are 7 billion. Sometimes I used to lie awake at night and think about all the people in the world. Jumbled hive of consciousness, trillions of busy multiplying cells. It was claustrophobic. There is no frontier left to discover, down there. Almost every inch of the Earth has been trodden under a million feet. Photographed hundreds of thousands of times. But,’ and he closed his eyes, ‘to be alone is divine. To trek through lightless craters, leave the first and sole footprints on Martian mountains. Tear through the hard vacuum of space unfettered by the sickly mass of humanity we left behind.’ He leant forward and caught Eliot’s gaze. ‘There is only yourself, first and last. Meet him with courage, meet him with gladness. There is only one. There is love to be found. Adventure to be had.’

Eliot shifted uncomfortably, then pressed record on his camera, if only to put a barrier between himself and this man. ‘I…’ he said, ‘I’ve been told to go around the ship and ask everyone about their first impressions of life on board. I only have you and Jesse Solloway left.’

Cai stared unsmilingly at the camera. ‘Nothing to report. Progress has been good. About fifty years ago, before fictitious-force gravity-dromes were widely used, a lot of the time aboard a new craft was spent adjusting to zero gravity. That’s no longer an impediment; with our feet firmly on the ground, I’ve spent the past week or so making the ship habitable. As the hydroponics expert, I spend a lot of my time up in the greenhouse growing the plants that in a year or two we will come to rely on as our primary food source and which will provide and filter a small percentage of our oxygen. Needless to say, this is a vital role and that is the reason I was scheduled to rendezvous with the Damocles so early on in the mission instead of in a month when the ship flies-by Mars.

‘At the time of this recording, we have twenty-three years until we reach Terra. Twenty-one days down, approximately 8,374 to go.’ Cai set his empty mug in the sink before he left the room.

‘Was it good?’ Poppy asked, leaning over Eliot’s shoulder while he played the recording over again. She crossed the name ‘Cai Tsang’ off their list. ‘Only one left,’ she said, then brushed her fingers across her forehead with a frown. ‘You know, could you do the last one alone? I think I have a bit of a headache. I might go and lie down.’

Eliot gritted his teeth and headed downstairs to find Jesse.

Jesse and Eliot had never been good friends. Their social circles did not intersect, and the only term they had lived together was in the first year of sixth form, when Eliot had been assigned Jesse as a roommate.

On the face of it, the two boys had cohabited for ten weeks in a kind of awkward peace. But Eliot, who had always been terrified of confrontation, found Jesse’s strange habits deeply irritating. He despised the smell of incense, which Jesse burned whenever the dormitory was empty in flagrant disregard of the school’s fire-safety regulations, so that their room smelt like a hippy curiosity shop. He hated the other boy’s slovenliness. Eliot alphabetized his DVD collection; Jesse discarded his boxers like orange peels across the rug, alongside foil wrappers of cereal bars spewing stale crumbs. The odd hours he kept, waking up late and then staying awake until the early hours of the morning, his skin sickly in the wan light of his computer, googling diseases and then examining the whites of his eyes in the mirror. It was the autumn term, and, as the days diminished, so did Eliot’s patience. Something about the darkness that cloaked their room, something about the cold that set in and the condensation that blinded the windows, made the situation even more claustrophobic. By the time December came, Eliot despised even the sound of the boy’s footsteps, cursed the obnoxious way he cleared his throat.

A cruel joke, now, that they were sharing a room for years. Those grim weeks of annoyance and passive aggression had been a brief primer for eternity. Instead of Ara’s face, he’d wake up to Jesse’s. Eliot shuddered as he headed down the bridge. Once again he reminded himself that it wasn’t Jesse’s fault. But Eliot could not help but remember that, less than four hours after Ara died, Jesse had leapt into the light and volunteered for her place, like a vulture descending on a corpse. He hated him for that.