‘Right.’ He half smiled. ‘Of course. That’s what brought us up here. That’s all that can keep us.’
Chapter 13
POPPY
29.05.12
TWO WEEKS ON THE Damocles and Poppy was already tired of hearing Astrid talk about Terra-Two. She could not imagine the schools of silver fish that lanced through lagoons, or the periwinkle birds’ eggs nested in leaves, or the mountain ranges where the suns never set.
For herself, Poppy couldn’t wait to see the green prospect of Terra-Two in the window of the ship. The thought of taking the shuttle down into the atmosphere and leaving the first human footprints on white alien shores made her stomach quiver with excitement. And yet the finer details of her life on Terra-Two had always been vague. She never understood how it was possible to ache like Astrid for a land she had never travelled. Earth was enough for her.
Earth had always been enough for her, and she realized it only when it was gone.
There was a Portuguese word for it that Poppy knew: saudade. A longing for something that might never return.
After the launch, Poppy had witnessed her first orbital sunrise through the window of the shuttle an hour before they were due to rendezvous with the Damocles. They had been allowed to float out of their seats and gaze out the window at Earth below. For most of their journey the planet had been cast in shadow, a black and swollen ocean. Poppy watched as it tumbled slowly out of the way of the sun. Dawn began as an electric-blue arc of light cresting above the horizon, and when the sun appeared it was a fire-red pea on the perimeter, which burst forth, turning white and filling the porthole with brilliant rays of light. Everyone turned for just a second; even Fae and Igor stopped what they were doing, looked up from their monitors and craned their necks to gaze down at their old home.
There is a strange disassociation that comes from seeing something for the first time in real life when you have seen it thousands of times before on television or in magazines. The Eiffel Tower, the Angel of the North, a total solar eclipse. Poppy had anticipated that she would feel that same detached familiarity when she finally saw Earth. But that afternoon after the launch, in the shuttle, Poppy realized that she had been mistaken. Realized that, in the vast solar system, her planet was the greatest sight to see. Impossible not to marvel at it. To tremble in its light. Whorls of clouds, larger than mountains but delicate as breath, ivory vapour trails, so much dark sea. When she finally beheld it, with her own eyes, and not through satellite images or computer reconstructions, she began to cry. She felt like Lot’s wife as she gazed at the deserts and the sea. Ripples in the sand dunes appeared as black striations against the golden ground. The coastlines were a brilliant chrome blue and the mountain ranges were like scars on the Earth. Poppy felt it for the first time – a scintilla of doubt. Her own sickness, homesickness.
To her relief, in the tumult of the days that followed – when they were settling into the Damocles and every hour was filled with work – she would only remember that feeling whenever she awoke in the night with a jolt and saw, in the porthole of her bedroom, only darkness.
Their days on the Damocles were similar to their final day before the launch. They were expected to wake by 6.30 for a full day of classes, tutorials and three hours of chores required for the maintenance and upkeep of their home. The only free time that Poppy could really enjoy was after dinner, at 8 p.m. The Atlas – the observation capsule near the greenhouse – had become her favourite place to lounge. It was just big enough for two people to sit on the little bench in front of the glass. There was a telescope and a monitor displaying a star map, and when she touched the screen it answered her questions about the constellations. Poppy would climb the ladder up to the little room, look back at Earth and read about Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Fornax, Orion… every one.
She loved watching when the planet rolled in front of the sun, and the cities began to blaze against its shadowed face. Through their telescope, she could pick out London and Lagos and the whole of the east coast of America through a recognisable lacework of roads. By day, the cities were cement-coloured smudges against the land, indistinguishable from the grey-green of suburbs and countryside, but, at night, humanity shouted its existence at the stars. Poppy could tell the population density from the sodium orange belts of light that made up roads, country borders and interstate boundaries. Japanese cities burned blue-green, and a bright sprawl of mercury vapour lamps illuminated the streets along the black hollow of Tokyo Bay. Their commander pointed out Mecca, a patch of light against a jet desert, and the interstate highway that lanced across el Paso. All the places she would never go.
‘No wonder there’s global warming,’ Juno said that night, leaning into the window to take a photograph, ‘when you look at all this. There are so many people. It’s so bright.’
‘I can still see London,’ said Poppy.
‘It looks like a neuron,’ Juno said, jostling for the eyepiece. Poppy knew what she meant. The glowing nucleus branching off in glittering interlocking trails of light. The Thames slit a dark line through the city and opened like an inky mouth at the estuary.
‘Do you think they can still see us?’
‘Not likely,’ Juno said, shrugging, ‘not without a telescope.’
Viewed from the side, Poppy could see the opalescent layers of the planet’s atmosphere. It looked as delicate as a bubble and yet it kept the world beneath them alive. It trapped in heat, it set fire to rogue asteroids on course for civilization and protected the life below from cosmic radiation. For a few days, their course had been on the right latitude for Poppy to see streams of charged particles sucked into the Earth’s magnetic field. They smashed into atoms in the upper atmosphere and excited electrons. The Northern Lights. Whenever she gazed at them, she thought about what a great thing it was to be alive right at that moment.
There were people on Earth squinting through telescopes and following the progress of the Damocles through the sky. Is my mother one of them? Poppy wondered sometimes. Her mother was the only one she was leaving behind. Just weeks into their mission and she only communicated with her daughter in cryptic emails, hyperlinked articles that Poppy couldn’t always open, photographs of horoscopes cut out from the local newspaper or screenshots from websites. Poppy never knew how to reply. She always wondered if her mother scoured the internet for the predictions she knew were relevant – perhaps that was why the most recent had read:
Virgo: Jupiter continues to transit your solar ninth house. Under this influence, you may have opportunities to travel, study abroad and expand your horizons.
Whenever she opened a link to another horoscope, Poppy couldn’t figure out if she was confused or disappointed. She had been glad to leave her mother behind, and every time she was glad she was also guilty.
Dear Poppy, this year eclipses will fall into your solar fourth and tenth houses and third and ninth houses. The sun is setting fast. Take a stand against disillusion. Good things can last.
Did she think that Poppy would understand her, now that they had the stars in common?
Chapter 14
ELIOT
03.06.12
ELIOT KEPT THINKING ABOUT Cai’s life on Mars. The man had arrived in his own shuttle, a week earlier, worn out by his journey. They’d all stood by the hatch grinning, and Poppy had painted a banner saying ‘Welcome’. As the hatch opened they all clapped, but Cai greeted the crew with a narrow-eyed snarl, so exhausted by the ship’s gravity that he slumped against the airlock wall. He was in his fifties and had spent most of his life on Mars, talking to computer monitors and plants. He had engineered anaerobic cacti that flourished in the arid craters of that planet, tended to oxygen gardens and landscaped botanical parks. He’d spent so long on Elysium Mons that most of his equipment was still stained the haematic red of the soil. Eliot had heard Igor say that they had been lucky to recruit him for this mission. Cai had been coming to end of his tenure at the International Laboratory and was looking to discover, for himself, what alien plant life blossomed in the soil of Terra-Two.