Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

For a moment the name drew a blank, but then Poppy remembered the thin boy with the living room the size of her mother’s flat. She remembered being happily drunk and looking up at all her faces reflected back in the crystal teardrops on the chandelier. ‘There must have been about three hundred people,’ she said. The rooms were packed, and students she knew distantly from the local schools were smoking weed in the garden, daring each other to leap topless into the marble fountain.

‘More than that, for sure.’

‘And that cake… it was like a wedding cake.’

Harry started laughing. ‘Yeah, Oliver Tammon and I played that game to see how far we could hit the ball out and I got it all the way across that field. Like four hundred feet.’

Poppy was still smiling when she looked at him quizzically and asked, ‘You did?’

‘Course I did. You were there,’ Harry said. ‘You were. And Oli bet you and Kate fifty pounds that you wouldn’t be able to get it back.’ Poppy shook her head with a shrug. ‘How could you forget that? It was so fucking awesome. Everyone was talking about it the whole night.’

‘Maybe I wasn’t there for that bit?’

‘You were!’ Harry shouted loud enough to make everyone start.

‘Okay,’ said Jesse, cutting another piece of cake from the plate in the middle. ‘Cool it. It’s not like it matters anymore.’

‘Right,’ said Harry, turning on him, ‘that’s your philosophy, isn’t it, nothing matters. I bet it makes you feel so cool. But something’s got to matter.’

‘Well, you know,’ Jesse stretched his legs out in front of him, ‘nothing really matters. I mean, Earth stuff. Think about how famous you guys were when we launched – all those people and all those magazines – for a while you were the most famous people on the planet. And what use is it to any of us up here? It’s not like it makes a difference anymore, not like we can take it with us. Even other things, like school, being popular or being rich…’ He trailed off with a shrug.

‘Some of it’s got to matter,’ Harry said, quietly, more to himself.

‘I suppose we can decide,’ Juno said. ‘Hey, when you think about it, we’re sort of like a community or a society, right here, the six of us. We get to choose what’s important to us.’

‘That’s weird.’ Poppy shuddered.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know, like we’re… on our own…’

Astrid looked up. ‘Is it though? Look around.’ And Poppy did for a moment, glancing at the others, who were seated cross-legged in a circle around the half-eaten cake. ‘Can you imagine what it will be like the day we look out the window of the Atlas module and we see Terra-Two the way we used to be able to see Earth? Can you picture us all swooping down into the atmosphere on the lander and standing there, feeling like we’ve come to an end but also a sunlit beginning. Picture it, for a moment,’ Astrid continued, her voice strong. ‘I do, every day. When you think about it, we’re like pioneers. We’re the first, and after us, if we’re lucky, there will be a whole country. Countries.’

‘It’s kind of a big responsibility,’ Jesse said.

Poppy leant forward in the silence and took another fat slice of cake. Dessert was such a luxury in this world where they survived on macronutrient broth.

‘It’s a little childish,’ Astrid said, ‘but I thought of a few games we could play.’

Harry smiled. ‘It’s not a party without a game.’

JUNO

^15.07.12

THEY HAD USED THREE rations of sugar and cocoa powder to make the cake, so it was sickly sweet and black as sin. Juno had been so distracted by the hot feeling of it in her stomach that she missed the count and was out of it until everyone was running to find a hiding place.

Harry closed his eyes and Poppy spun around, her heels flashing pink as she shimmied between a gap in the bookcases, a finger pressed against her lips as she disappeared. In half a second Eliot and Jesse were gone, racing down the corridor, thrilled by the competition. Astrid dashed through the hatch, down to the lower deck, flicking off the lights as she went, the sound of her stifled giggle audible in the sudden darkness. Everyone was trying not to trip over things as they ran, their blood thick with sugar, the air chiming with laughter or bated breath.

Juno didn’t want to get in the way of the fun, but she had no real appetite for another game. Over the past few weeks, she had watched both Eliot and Jesse grit their teeth as Harry’s high score on the simulator tripled and their progress stalled. She’d witnessed the competition spill out from the games room into the crew module, where Jesse beat Harry and Eliot in a four-hour chess tournament, to the kitchen – the setting for red-eyed staring contests – and Igor’s lessons, where Harry and Eliot argued over formulae and scribbled convoluted equations on the whiteboard. Card games and arm-wrestling matches almost resulted in blows. The air between the three boys prickled with the static of imminent combustion.