Poppy had nodded. ‘A couple of times.’
Poppy was filled, then, with an urgent terror that if she spent another year in that flat she would die there.
So she applied to Dalton, applied to everywhere that would take her, and only thought about how she might pay for it when the acceptances slipped through the letter box.
Even after she was accepted by Dalton Academy, and most of her time was spent with her new friends in the grounds of the school, the dread rose up in her whenever the holidays approached.
There was only so long she could survive in that flat in Liverpool, breathing air that was stale with her mother’s misery. And, although there was a nostalgic tether that tugged at her every time she left, although the cracked roads rose up to meet her, although her mother begged her not to leave when the term began – the tide of dread and self-preservation was always stronger, beckoning Poppy further and further out again.
Chapter 22
JUNO
15.07.12
BY SUNDAY, JUNO WAS convinced she had not seen Poppy leave their cabin all week. Poppy had tried to convince the senior astronauts that she was too ill to attend lessons or group mealtimes. And, as the days went by, the senior crew were getting more and more concerned. Every time Fae or Commander Sheppard attempted to talk to her about it, Poppy would burst into tears. Sheppard had suggested that they give her ‘some space,’ that perhaps she needed more time to adjust to their new environment, but by mid-July Juno was sure that they should try another form of intervention.
She woke up early that morning and went for a run. Once she’d showered she headed up to the comms deck, where Poppy was supposed to be running software updates. Instead, she found Eliot and Astrid hunched over the keyboard, both their ears covered with headphones.
‘What are you doing?’ Juno asked, looking down at her watch. Astrid and Eliot stared unflinchingly at the display, her face cast in pale light, his eyes far away.
When Juno tapped her sister on the shoulder, she jolted, then looked up with a startled intake of breath.
‘I can’t hear you,’ she shouted, even as she pulled her headphones off her ears.
‘Where’s Poppy?’ Juno asked.
‘Where she always is,’ Astrid said with a shrug, ‘our bedroom.’ She touched her headphones, already threatening to put them back on, then she turned to her sister with a frown. ‘What were you doing?’
‘I just went for a run.’
Astrid stared at her. ‘It’s not your day,’ she said, her voice spiked with suspicion. ‘You don’t do cardio on Sundays.’
‘You don’t do comms ever,’ Juno said, gesturing towards the monitors.
Astrid’s eyes brightened with excitement. ‘Eliot’s showing me how to use the new communications software. Want to have a look?’ She gestured toward a little navigation display. ‘See, that’s us.’ She pointed to a little blip just under the amber disc of Mars. Jupiter was cut off in the corner of the screen, so Juno could only see the pale arc of its edge in the schematic. In the dotted path of their ship’s trajectory was an ivory bubble, which represented Europa. ‘That’s the Orlando.’ Astrid pointed to a tiny flashing light on the moon’s perimeter. ‘Though you can’t really see it, and we won’t be able to until we get a bit closer. But we’re getting near enough to tune in to them. In a week we’ll be able to have a conversation in real time.’
The thought filled Juno with excitement. The rendezvous with the American space station had been added relatively late to their itinerary, so soon before the launch that Juno had all but forgotten about it. She and her crewmates had been about ten years old when the first expedition launched, so young that Juno had grown up with the distant sense that there had always been people orbiting Jupiter’s icy moon.
The first astronauts to go had been Captain Omar Briggs and Dr Sie Yan, a married couple who specialized in xenobiology. It made Juno’s mind reel when she realized that for over a decade the two of them had been staring down the lens of a microscope, working to genetically engineer a crop of plants capable of thriving in the ocean that was hidden under the frozen surface of Europa. ‘A decade alone in a box is enough to test any marriage,’ Commander Sheppard often said with a laugh. He’d been the best man at their wedding, and he and Briggs had shared a tent for seven months when they scaled Olympus Mons.
The second expedition to the Orlando had launched years later. The astronauts involved were young recruits who’d emerged from the USA’s space academy system: Kennedy, James and Cal, the smiling, suntanned forerunners of the Beta. Juno couldn’t wait to meet them.
‘Can you talk to anyone on that?’ she asked, nodding at the computer.
‘Sure. If they’re within range,’ Eliot said, then he rolled his eyes up in thought. ‘We can always send messages. But, obviously, the further out we go the further the signal has to travel. And the longer we have to wait for a response. By the time we reach Saturn it will take about eighty minutes for Earth to get our messages, and the same amount of time for us to hear a response. So, you know, no kind of real-time conversation will really be possible. But, we don’t have to think about that for a while…’
‘And the Orlando is the furthest human outpost,’ Astrid finished. ‘The furthest humans have travelled in our solar system.’
‘Except for the Shēngmìng,’ Juno said.
‘Well, not really.’ Eliot took his hands off the control deck. ‘No one knows where that ship is. Or if it’s even still out there.’
‘Of course it’s out there,’ Juno replied. Although the Chinese generation ship had gone radio silent around two years ago, Juno still imagined it floating like a shadow through the solar system, making its slow way to Terra-Two. The Chinese government had launched it four years ago – a bright vessel with 100 passengers, on a trip expected to last a century. Sometimes Juno wondered what it would be like to leave Earth behind, and – unlike the crew of the Damocles, who had access to Igor’s technology – to know for certain that only her grandchildren or great-grandchildren would ever set foot on Terra-Two. What would they be like by the time they arrived? The children of another century, whose parents and grandparents had lived and died in the void? It had seemed inhumane to Juno, to raise children in the sanitized air of a spaceship, who would live and die without ever seeing a cloud or touching a lake. By the time they reached their promised destination, would they even remember what they were looking for?
Two years ago, the crew on the Shēngmìng had filed for the right to be recognized as a separate state, which led to an inquiry into life on the ship. Their commander, Zhang Wei, had died and been replaced by the scientist Xiao Lin, whose voice crowded the airwaves for a while. They had painted a new flag, changed their name and written up a constitution. The astronauts refused to be considered employees of the Chinese National Space Administration and proudly presented themselves as citizens of a new country.
They had debated it in school. Some argued that the Outer Space Treaty meant that a spacecraft could not be considered an independent country. To many, the idea was ridiculous. And yet there was no denying that the citizens of the Shēngmìng appeared to have adopted their own set of laws and system of government, and lived in harmony under its jurisdiction.
‘We have built a beautiful country,’ Xiao Lin had said.
And now Juno could imagine how it happened; of course the tightly knit group of astronauts, sharing space, sharing food, united against the hostile environment outside, would come to identify with each other, come to rely on and love one another to the exclusion of everything else in the universe. ‘For all we know, they could all be dead,’ said the cynical spokespeople when the ship went silent. But this speculation was squashed once the government picked up video feeds of smiling people in flight suits, their faces reflected in the glassy torus of the deck. At their feet were bouncing children with free access to education, healthcare, food, everyone working to give back to each other. It sounded like a utopia to Juno.