Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

Two weeks after they’d arrived on the Damocles, Poppy had come down with a cold – a mild fever, airways stuffed with cotton wool, a head that felt like a fish tank – and Fae allowed her to take a day off work on the condition that she catch up with her chores over the weekend. Poppy had spent the next three days in bed, and sleep came so easily, submerged her again and again like warm water. Even when Poppy tried to get up, a few days later, her bones were heavy. Suddenly everything seemed like an awful lot of work and she no longer had it in her to do it. She couldn’t see the point. As the days passed more and more things fell away. She realized that she had spent her entire life blindly beating back against a tide of futility, performing tasks she would only have to do again and again: changing filters, cleaning rooms, updating software, scraping away the black dirt that aggregated under her fingernails. The others could not see with her keen eyes; they were still fighting, they were still working as if they had forgotten that one day their eyes would shut and maggots would wriggle into their stomachs and the marrow in their bones would turn to dust.

That was happening to Poppy already, only slowly.

The day of her birthday, Poppy opened her eyes and saw Harry’s face. He had twisted a sheet of coloured paper into a cone and tied it on top of his head like a party hat. ‘It’s your birthday,’ he said with a smile.

‘Is it?’ Her mouth was sour, her teeth furry and unbrushed.

‘You’re twenty.’

‘I’m twenty.’ The words came as a hollow surprise and made Poppy’s stomach twist.

‘Hey, don’t cry,’ he said, although she hadn’t realized that she was. Harry leant down, wiped a tear away with his thumb and then licked it.

Twenty, she had heard, was young in the scheme of things. And yet it was the oldest she had ever been.

‘We have a surprise for you,’ Harry said.

‘You do?’

He nodded. ‘Outside.’

When Poppy stepped outside, everyone shouted ‘Happy Birthday!’ They had cut strips of paper into ribbons and hung them from the beams in the crew module, made a banner with a red Sharpie and printer paper so the Ps in ‘HAPPY’ and ‘Poppy’ looked like candy-canes. They’d made her a cake, substituted apple sauce for the eggs they didn’t have and covered it with icing and hundreds and thousands. Commander Sheppard sang as Eliot thrashed out lively chords on his guitar. Fae, Igor and Cai clapped, while Juno, Astrid and Jesse gesticulated wildly, with all the glad energy of a circus troupe.

Poppy looked at all their smiling faces and felt the love. She smiled back, because these people didn’t know that it hurt inside her, and why should they have to? Their singing, peppy and discordant as it was, came to her as if from behind a pane of glass. She smiled numbly the whole way through and when they were finished she ate the cake with her fingers. It was good, the way the sugar entered her veins, and she closed her eyes and said, ‘This is good.’ It was the first thing she had eaten all day and she could feel it sizzling in the emptiness inside her. ‘I could eat the whole thing. I could eat several, every day for the rest of my life.’

‘Well, just a little for me,’ said Juno, leaning over Astrid’s shoulder as she held the cake knife. ‘No… No, less than that. Half – I said half – of that…’

‘Shame we don’t have any candles,’ Astrid said. ‘Fire hazard.’

‘Twenty’s a lot of candles,’ Harry teased.

‘It’ll be you in a few months,’ Juno reminded him.

‘Yeah…’ He was thoughtful for a moment. ‘You’re right.’

‘Twenty’s okay,’ said Astrid. ‘It’s eighteen or nineteen that’s the problem. When you have to buy two packs of candles and they come in these weird sets of, like, seven or eleven or prime numbers and you always have loads spare.’

‘Oh yeah…’ Poppy laughed at a memory. ‘Remember when we had to buy something like four packs of five for—’ She cut off suddenly and her eyes darted to Eliot in alarm.

He looked up from the ground. ‘You can say her name, you know.’ Everyone ducked their heads. ‘That was Ara’s birthday. I remember.’

‘Well,’ Fae said, nibbling at a spoonful of her cake, ‘just wait until you get to fifty-six, that’s all I can say.’

‘Or seventy-eight.’ Igor laughed.

After they finished eating, the adults politely absented themselves, leaving the Betas to continue the party without them.

Poppy stuffed the rest of the cake in her mouth then ran a finger around her plate, licking off the remainder of the icing. ‘Well,’ she said finally, ‘it was always Ara who had the best birthdays.’

‘No,’ Harry said quickly, ‘there was Sebastian Branwell’s eighteenth.’