Years spent hunched in the low gravity of Mars had altered him forever, stretched his bones long and thin. He stood, now, at almost seven feet, his femurs and spine grossly elongated but brittle as a bird’s. He could barely stand in the 1g force on most of the ship and preferred to spend his time in the greenhouse, where the gravity was 60 per cent that of the Earth’s.
Cai’s arrival had been exciting for the Beta crew for all of five minutes. He spoke little, rarely turned up to dinner and when he did he was sullen and ornery, his mouth turned down as if he was sucking on something sour. ‘Poorly socialized’ was the phrase that Eliot had heard Fae whisper.
Eliot wondered what it had been like to be alone for that long. He wanted to ask him, but was nervous about approaching the older man. In between the arrival and departure of various international expeditions, Cai had manned the Mars laboratory alone, living on the same cycle of freeze-dried meals and thumbing through the same old paperbacks abandoned in the library.
The reporters on Earth had regularly posed that same question to all of the members of the Beta: how do you cope with the isolation on board the ship? They didn’t know that, in some ways, this was the least alone Eliot had been his whole life. Sharing a room with other boys, the constant chatter that rumbled through the walls from morning bell until night, the regular keening of various life-support machines. Everything was shared, the one-size-fits-all jumpsuits that they all took turns scrubbing and then posting into their uniform cubbyholes on the lower deck, the bedsheets and most of the food. The board games donated by various charities and the vast library of TV shows and movies and books stored in the ship’s databank.
He’d said to the reporters, ‘I’m handling the loneliness just fine.’ But he never mentioned the other kind of loneliness that was eating him like a cancer; the constant phantom-limb pain of grief over Ara’s death. He was certain that everyone could see his suffering and was wincing at the sight of it. So most of the time Eliot communicated with the rest of the crew from behind the lens of a camera, which made them smile dumbly at him and stare straight through.
What was Mars like? he wondered. Was the ground soft like sand underfoot, or was it cracked as skin and stone-hard?
Some months, Cai had been the only person on the entire planet.
‘How did you fight the loneliness?’ Eliot finally summoned the courage to ask him one evening after dinner.
Cai did not look up. ‘Are you filming me?’ he asked, tipping heaped teaspoons of sugar into his coffee.
‘Not yet,’ Poppy said, turning to Eliot just to double check the light on the side of his camera. Then she looked back at Cai and asked, ‘How can you drink that stuff? It tastes as if it was made in a lab. It tastes like lighter fluid.’
‘Is lighter fluid a popular beverage in England?’ Cai asked, his mouth curling a little.
Poppy and Eliot had been instructed, by a few producers at the Interplanetary Channel, to downlink more footage of the elusive new astronaut.
‘Everybody has their drug of choice,’ Cai said. His nervous fingers drew a circle around the rim of his cup. Eliot noticed that they were stained the acid-green of the fertilizer he handled all day. ‘Though,’ Cai continued, ‘spend as long as I have in space and you’ll discover that choice really has very little to do with it.’ Finally, he turned to the camera with his grey eyes. ‘Put that thing down, would you?’
Eliot obliged.
‘Now, what did you ask me?’ Cai asked.
‘About what?’
‘About the loneliness?’
Blood flooded Eliot’s cheeks. He hadn’t realized that he’d asked the question out loud. ‘Nothing,’ he said. Cai simply stared at him, his stained fingers making hollow tapping sounds on the side of his cup.
‘I mean,’ Poppy said, to fill the silence, looking between the two men, ‘you haven’t set foot on Earth for over thirty years.’
‘That’s correct,’ Cai said.
‘Is there something you miss the most?’ she asked.
The scientist took a moment to think and then said, ‘Nothing at all. You know, there is nothing about this life that does not suit me. There were 2.7 billion people on Earth the year I was born and now there are 7 billion. Sometimes I used to lie awake at night and think about all the people in the world. Jumbled hive of consciousness, trillions of busy multiplying cells. It was claustrophobic. There is no frontier left to discover, down there. Almost every inch of the Earth has been trodden under a million feet. Photographed hundreds of thousands of times. But,’ and he closed his eyes, ‘to be alone is divine. To trek through lightless craters, leave the first and sole footprints on Martian mountains. Tear through the hard vacuum of space unfettered by the sickly mass of humanity we left behind.’ He leant forward and caught Eliot’s gaze. ‘There is only yourself, first and last. Meet him with courage, meet him with gladness. There is only one. There is love to be found. Adventure to be had.’
Eliot shifted uncomfortably, then pressed record on his camera, if only to put a barrier between himself and this man. ‘I…’ he said, ‘I’ve been told to go around the ship and ask everyone about their first impressions of life on board. I only have you and Jesse Solloway left.’
Cai stared unsmilingly at the camera. ‘Nothing to report. Progress has been good. About fifty years ago, before fictitious-force gravity-dromes were widely used, a lot of the time aboard a new craft was spent adjusting to zero gravity. That’s no longer an impediment; with our feet firmly on the ground, I’ve spent the past week or so making the ship habitable. As the hydroponics expert, I spend a lot of my time up in the greenhouse growing the plants that in a year or two we will come to rely on as our primary food source and which will provide and filter a small percentage of our oxygen. Needless to say, this is a vital role and that is the reason I was scheduled to rendezvous with the Damocles so early on in the mission instead of in a month when the ship flies-by Mars.
‘At the time of this recording, we have twenty-three years until we reach Terra. Twenty-one days down, approximately 8,374 to go.’ Cai set his empty mug in the sink before he left the room.
‘Was it good?’ Poppy asked, leaning over Eliot’s shoulder while he played the recording over again. She crossed the name ‘Cai Tsang’ off their list. ‘Only one left,’ she said, then brushed her fingers across her forehead with a frown. ‘You know, could you do the last one alone? I think I have a bit of a headache. I might go and lie down.’
Eliot gritted his teeth and headed downstairs to find Jesse.
Jesse and Eliot had never been good friends. Their social circles did not intersect, and the only term they had lived together was in the first year of sixth form, when Eliot had been assigned Jesse as a roommate.
On the face of it, the two boys had cohabited for ten weeks in a kind of awkward peace. But Eliot, who had always been terrified of confrontation, found Jesse’s strange habits deeply irritating. He despised the smell of incense, which Jesse burned whenever the dormitory was empty in flagrant disregard of the school’s fire-safety regulations, so that their room smelt like a hippy curiosity shop. He hated the other boy’s slovenliness. Eliot alphabetized his DVD collection; Jesse discarded his boxers like orange peels across the rug, alongside foil wrappers of cereal bars spewing stale crumbs. The odd hours he kept, waking up late and then staying awake until the early hours of the morning, his skin sickly in the wan light of his computer, googling diseases and then examining the whites of his eyes in the mirror. It was the autumn term, and, as the days diminished, so did Eliot’s patience. Something about the darkness that cloaked their room, something about the cold that set in and the condensation that blinded the windows, made the situation even more claustrophobic. By the time December came, Eliot despised even the sound of the boy’s footsteps, cursed the obnoxious way he cleared his throat.