The New World

But I’m breathing.

‘Mum?’ I say, looking down and around. ‘Mum?’

‘Viola?’ I hear.

‘Mum?’ I twist round to where her seat should be-

But it’s not there-

I twist round some more-

And there she is, resting against the ceiling, her chair ripped from the floor-

And the way she’s lying there-

The way she’s lying there broken-

‘Viola?’ she says again.

And the way she says it makes my chest grip tight as a fist.

No, I think. No.

And I start the struggle to get out of my chair to get to her.

***

‘Big day tomorrow, Skipper,’ my dad said, coming into the engine room, where I was replacing tubes of coolant, one of about a million chores they’d come up with in the past five months to keep me busy. ‘We’ll finally be entering orbit.’

I clicked in the last coolant tube. ‘Terrific.’

He paused. ‘I know this hasn’t been easy for you, Viola.’

‘Why do you care if it wasn’t?’ I said. ‘I didn’t have any say in the matter.’

He came closer. ‘Okay, what are you really frightened of, Viola?’ he said, and it’s so exactly the question Bradley asked me that I look back at him. ‘Is it what we could find there? Or is it just that it’s change?’

I sighed heavily. ‘No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky’s too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?’

‘And what if the air tastes of honey? What if there’s so much food we all get too fat? What if the sky is so beautiful we don’t get any work done because we’re all looking at it too much?’

I turned and closed up the coolant tube cases. ‘But what if it isn’t?’

‘But what if it is?’

‘What if it isn’t?’

‘What if it is?’

‘Yeah, this is getting us somewhere.’

‘Haven’t we raised you to be hopeful?’ he said. ‘Wasn’t that the whole point of your great-grandmother agreeing to be a caretaker on this ship, so that one day you could have a better life? She was full of hope. Your mum and I are full of hope.’ He was close enough now for a hug, if I wanted it. ‘Why can’t you share some of that?’

And he was looking so caring, so worried, that how could I tell him? How could I tell him how much I hate even the sound of the word?

Hope. That’s all anyone ever talked about on the convoy, especially as we got closer. Hope, hope, hope.

As in, ‘I hope the weather’s good.’ This from people who’d never actually experienced weather except in immersive vids.

Or, ‘I hope there’s interesting wildlife.’ From people who’d only ever met Scampus and Bumpus, the ship’s cats on the Delta. 10,000 frozen sheep and cow embryos didn’t count.

Or, ‘I hope the natives are friendly.’ This always said with a laugh because there aren’t supposed to be any natives, at least according to the deep space probes.

Everybody was hoping for something, talking about our new life to come and all that they hoped from it. Fresh air, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Real gravity, instead of the fake kind that broke every now and then (even though no one over fifteen would admit that it was actually really fun when it did). All the wide open spaces we’d have, all the new people we’d meet when we woke them up, ignoring completely what happened to the original settlers, super-confident that we were so much better equipped that nothing bad could possibly happen to us.

All this hope, and here I was, right at the very edge of it, looking out into the darkness, the first to see it coming, the first to greet it when we found out what it really looked like.

But what if?

‘Is it because hope is scary?’ my father asked.

I looked back at him, startled. ‘You think so, too?’

He smiled, full of love. ‘Hope is terrifying, Viola,’ he said. ‘No one wants to admit it, but it is.’

I feel my eyes go wet again. ‘Then how can you stand it? How can you bear even thinking it? It feels so dangerous, like you’ll be punished for even thinking you deserved it.’

He touched my arm, just lightly. ‘Because, Viola, life is so much more terrifying without it.’