Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

After that night at the dinner table when Astrid first heard about their movement, she could not help herself. She watched all the videos she could find about them. Clips that had already garnered thousands of views in certain corners of the internet. Read comment threads and forums devoted to discussing Tessa Dalton, the unwitting founder and martyr of their movement. She’d been called out of obscurity like Mary, the mother of Jesus, like the Old Testament prophets, or the Magi who trekked across countries following portents they’d divined in the stars.

New Creationism was in perfect harmony with Astrid’s religious upbringing. In Sunday school, she’d been taught about the Garden of Eden. For a whole year of her life she could not help but imagine it: eternal life, milk and honey, God walking like a giant amongst the trees. She imagined the agony of being cast out. Tried to envision what kind of life Adam and Eve could eke out after that. Rebels, fools, they’d lost everything.

And so Astrid was converted to New Creationism. It happened all at once, like an earthquake, a momentous shift, the tectonic plates of her belief rearranged violently under her. It happened the day she saw Terra-Two.

She had followed Eliot down to the engineering deck to see the new images of the planet that had been uploaded by NASA.

Astrid had always found the engineering deck a little creepy. As the ship’s engineer, the person who spent the most time there was Igor Bovarin. His pencilled diagrams were draped across empty patches of wall and any careless step threatened to knock over a wobbling tower of his dog-eared manuals. Astrid spotted him emerging from the shadows between the machines so often that every darkened alcove seemed to mirror the hunch of his back. Every oil spill looked like a footprint from his boots and the chug of the machines resembled his dry cough and heavy breathing.

‘Astrid said you wanted to see me?’ Eliot asked, stepping further into the gloom. Igor smiled, the light coming off his old lamp illuminating his face sodium-yellow and accentuating the lines in his liver-spotted skin. Astrid followed Eliot and ducked into the honey-coloured light of their little workstation. It smelt of oil and ink.

‘Astrid, Eliot,’ Igor said, their names still an exotic delight in his thick accent. ‘Sit. I have something to show you both.’

Astrid saw Eliot’s eyes fill with the kind of rapt attention he only ever paid the aging cosmonaut. It was no secret that Eliot idolized the man. Astrid had been present the first time Igor made a surprise appearance during a physics class at Dalton, and Eliot had been struck dumb with delight. So happy that he waited behind by the Bunsen burners for everybody to leave and then asked Igor to sign a battered copy of his biography, which Astrid knew Eliot kept under his desk for inspiration. It was no surprise that Eliot had been chosen to come under Igor’s tutelage. He was lucky to be learning everything Igor could teach him about engineering, physics and the ion engine in the two decades they had together, she thought.

Igor was holding a device shaped like an egg.

‘It’s an Albatross,’ Eliot explained to Astrid as she ran her finger quizzically along the upturned base of it. ‘One of the most powerful cameras in the world. If we flew this thing over London Bridge we’d probably be able to count all the greys on every head.’

‘That’s right,’ Igor agreed.

‘NASA were using one for a long-range reconnaissance mission. To retrieve high-resolution pictures and geological data of Terra-Two.’

‘Today, they broadcast their findings on global television,’ Igor said, and Astrid gasped with excitement. ‘You want to see?’

‘Please,’ Astrid said, breathless. Igor tapped some buttons on his keyboard, opened up windows and then expanded one into a full-screen video.

Astrid watched open-mouthed as the pictures unfolded on the screen. The room filled with the blue light of cresting waves exploding into white foam on alien shores. The bright reflections of two suns shimmered like silver coins off the surface of the water, one huge and one small.

‘Look at this.’ Igor paused the video as the aerial camera swooped over the ocean. He used his mouse to zoom into the mottled navy pattern that haloed a small island. As the picture resolved, Astrid saw what he was pointing to. A strange chalk-coloured skeleton just visible under the pale water. ‘Calcium-carbonate,’ Igor said. ‘The main compound in pearls, snail shells, egg-shells and—’

‘Coral reefs.’ Astrid finished the sentence for him, touching the screen. ‘They’re real.’

‘That’s right,’ Igor said. ‘Who would have thought?’

Astrid laughed. Terra-Two was beautiful and everything, every single thing was just the way that she had imagined.