That morning, Astrid thought that she might make a late start on some tutorial work that Igor had set them before their lesson later that day. She headed to the upper deck and around to the kitchen.
On her way, she passed the open door to Cai’s bedroom. The hydroponics expert was expected to arrive on a shuttle the following day. Whenever Astrid imagined him, she pictured his skin – would it be gun-metal grey from lack of sunlight? Would his bones be long and thin, distorted by the low gravity of Mars?
Further along the corridor she was distracted by the sound of a child’s voice. It was a young boy’s, filtering thinly through the open hatch by the flight deck. ‘…Daddy? When are you coming home?’
‘Stop asking him,’ said a woman.
‘I told you.’ Solomon Sheppard’s voice was still rough from sleep, undulating the way adults tended to when speaking to a child. ‘When you get a little older, you’ll come up here and live with me. In the place I’m going. Everyone will.’
‘Mummy too?’
‘Don’t put ideas into his head,’ said the woman. ‘Can you just sing. He won’t go to sleep if…’
Astrid stepped a little closer. The control deck was like an arcade, a wonder of maps, dials and spinning gauges, hundreds of colour-coded buttons lit up on different dashboards. A vast array of glowing monitors displaying the status of key components of the ship, close-circuit television screens, hand controls like joysticks.
She pressed her face against the glass to get a better view of the commander, speaking to his young son and wife. She had forgotten he was married. His wife was a fragile copper-skinned creature, cradling her son’s head against her chest. Already, her son looked bigger than Astrid remembered him. Commander Sheppard’s wife had been balancing him on her hip as she waved goodbye to the ship on launch day. Astrid had been too excited to think much of it, and Commander Sheppard rarely talked about his family. Astrid wondered, now, what Sheppard’s dreams were of Terra-Two – if he pictured it as a place for his children to grow old by his side.
‘I’ll sing your mum’s favourite,’ Solomon said, winking at his wife. Then he began to sing, and Astrid gasped in recognition. It was a Smiths song she’d loved growing up. She closed her eyes, pressing her face against the doorframe. She could almost hear the tristful guitar chords under his tenor. He was still humming it when the call shut off and the room filled with the grey light of static.
‘I love that song,’ Astrid said, opening her eyes finally.
‘Oh, really?’ Commander Sheppard must have known she was standing there, because he didn’t start or even turn around. He leant forward in his chair and pressed his hand against the monitor, as if it was a window to a darkened bedroom back on Earth.
‘How old is your son?’ Astrid asked. She felt the way she used to when they left Dalton on the weekends and spotted their teachers laughing together in the Café Nero at the train station or holding a pint at the local pub. It was like spotting a rare bird out of its habitat.
‘Three. I won’t be able to talk to him for much longer. There’s already a bit of a lag. And by the time we pass Mars real-time conversation with the Earth will already be impossible.’
‘Does your son want to be an astronaut as well?’
‘What three-year-old doesn’t?’ Sheppard turned in his seat. ‘But soon he won’t have a choice. The world is about to change, Astrid. Before the end of this century, the average global sea level is expected to rise six to nine metres. Half of the world’s population lives close to the sea and at about four degrees of warming, scientists are expecting the loss of all coastal cities. Venice, New Orleans, Tokyo, Dhaka… countries will be rendered entirely uninhabitable, vast swathes of North Africa and the Middle east, Central America. It will cause a new kind of refugee crisis, millions and millions homeless, destitute.
‘Can’t you see it happening now? An increase of extreme weather events, heatwaves and food shortages. Britain may be the first nation to land on Terra-Two, but how long until everyone who can afford it will flock to the skies? One day soon, there will be no “astronauts” or “pilgrims”, only “refugees”, “immigrants” and “fellow travellers”.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘My son will likely have no choice,’ he finally said. ‘Nor will his sons and daughters.’
Astrid nodded. She had heard talk like this before. She’d been born in the generation where they learned about climate change in geography and science classes from age nine. Heard about it so often that Astrid regarded global warming with the same limp and abstract horror as she did when she thought about the certainty of the sun dying and engulfing the Earth. The last Christmas had been particularly mild, and Astrid had even spotted daffodils sprouting near the wire fence around the churchyard. Everyone discussed the balmy weather and acknowledged their mutual and distant concern about global warming. Astrid sometimes guiltily indulged the thought that she would not be around to see it happen.
‘After being captain of this ship, my main responsibility involves writing reports about the progress and success of this mission and sending them back to Earth in the hopes that more like these will soon follow. Mass off-world colonization. For everyone. Not only the chosen few. I want to make that a reality.’
Astrid stepped further into the room and noticed with a start that Solomon was not wearing any shoes. These were the daily intimacies she’d have to get used to. Living with Solomon Sheppard, Astrid was able to witness the legend up close. To look at the bare soles of the youngest Brit on Mars, and become familiar with his daily routines. In the past two weeks of living on the ship, Astrid had noticed that he prayed five times a day on a mat he laid out in his bedroom. He didn’t drink coffee, but every morning he prepared himself a pot of peppermint tea, which he drank slowly and then cleaned meticulously. He liked jazz. Instead of a morning bell, he blasted John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space through the speakers, so that every morning the crew awoke to the crashing cymbals of ‘Mars’.
‘Was it hard to leave them?’ she asked, changing the subject and nodding at the computer monitor. Solomon shrugged again. They were on London time on the ship but in Houston – where his family had moved to – it was six hours behind.
‘It was hard,’ he said. ‘For Na’imah. But then she knew what she signed up for when she married me.’
Astrid was trying to figure out exactly how old Solomon was. When he’d been selected as the only Brit to fly to the Russian station on Mars, he had also been the youngest astronaut in history, at just twenty-five. Astrid had been eight or nine, then, which made him…
‘You know what that song’s about right?’ she asked. He shook his head, eyes blank and tired. ‘It’s about hope. You know, “the light”? The light that never goes out.’