Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

And she saw him for a moment, as she sometimes did, as just a little bit mean, his mouth twisted in a cruel sort of smile. But in the next moment he leant down and kissed her. She’d seen the shampoo that he used in his bathroom cubbyhole, an expensive brand. Sicilian lemon and tangerine. The smell was heady.

‘I feel it here too.’ He touched his stomach in the same place she had. ‘It hurts for me too.’

Chapter 16 ASTRID

^07.06.12

ASTRID WAS SURPRISED WHEN Poppy did not turn up for their lesson on Thursday. Group sessions normally took place around the kitchen table, with the senior crew member taking them standing at the head. That afternoon it was Cai, and the room was still ripe with the smell of the rehydrated chicken soup they’d had for lunch.

‘There are five of you,’ Cai said, looking over all of their heads as if he was not certain.

‘Poppy says she’s sick,’ Juno said, flicking a sticky pea off the table. ‘Who was on cleaning duty this week?’

‘Sick with what?’ Harry asked, slamming his folder down in front of him.

‘I don’t know.’ Juno sighed. ‘She says she’s been having headaches.’

‘Well, she’s supposed to get permission from the commander to miss a group lesson. And she’ll have to catch up,’ Cai said, then looked down at his tablet. ‘We’re going to look at the article I sent you all from the Journal of Marine Science and Ecology—’

‘Oh,’ said Juno, tapping the correct page on her tablet. ‘I’ve read it already. I think. The one about conservation genetics and coral reefs?’ She saw Astrid straighten up at her words, her eyes alight with excitement.

‘The reefs on Terra-Two?’ she asked, and as she said it she could see them, the rainbow-coloured coral, wreathed in teal weeds. She clapped her hands together in excitement. ‘We’re finally going to learn about them.’ But Astrid was surprised to see that everyone was looking at her quizzically.

‘What are you talking about?’ Harry asked. ‘What reefs?’

‘The coral reefs on Terra-Two,’ Astrid said. Eliot raised an eyebrow.

‘I’m not familiar with that,’ Cai said. ‘I don’t think we have much evidence of the marine life on Terra-Two. Now, can you please open that page?’ He turned to the whiteboard he’d wheeled from the corner. ‘Does this pen work? That’ll do. Right, now. Who can summarize negative frequency-dependent selection…?’ Juno and Harry raised her hands.

AS THE LESSON CONTINUED, the thought niggled at Astrid. She couldn’t remember anymore where she’d come by the notion of coral reefs on Terra-Two, or why she had such a clear image of them in her mind. During dinner that evening, both Commander Sheppard and Igor confirmed that they were not even sure that coral could survive, considering the high ocean temperatures on the planet.

So, during her free time after dinner, Astrid accessed the Damocles’ online library on her laptop. She discovered quickly that Cai had been right and there was no evidence of reefs, but Astrid followed one link after another, opening tab after tab in an encyclopaedia deep-dive that led her to a few biographies of Tessa Dalton.

Tessa Dalton had been the first person to dream of Terra-Two – although she lived and died in near obscurity. Astrid first heard the name in her second year in the programme, when a bronze statue of Tessa was erected in a red-brick quadrangle at Dalton Academy. The sculpture had been different in every way from the serene marble busts that overlooked the school assembly hall or the stern likenesses of the founders standing watch on the front lawn. A group of parents had complained when it was first donated to the school, because her naked body looked so lifelike. Tessa Dalton’s eyes were protuberant and pupil-less, turned skyward. It was not a flattering likeness: the wasted muscles in her thighs, the puckered scars on her forearms, deflated breasts hanging on the cage of her chest. Astrid came across a news article, dated the first of June, stating that the statue had disappeared.

Astrid already knew that the Dalton estate was over 400 years old. The family owned acres of land north of the River Thames, and had, for centuries, made their fortune from property developments in affluent swathes of the city. During Astrid’s lifetime, they were most famous for the multinational venture capital conglomerate to which they gave their name. But she knew that their school had been named after James Dalton, a maverick nineteenth-century offshoot of their family who worked all his life as an astronomer. James Dalton had discovered that the sun’s second-closest star system – after Alpha Centauri – was a binary. Two stars orbiting like dumbbells around a common centre of mass. Twins, swapping places every century, eternally eclipsing each other.