2030

[We hear a recording of the 1968 Christmas message (final sentence) from the Apollo 8 crew. After a pause a teenage female voice speaks, the ambient noise of a space station around her]

It’s easy to be hopeful from up here. The good Earth’s still blue, after all! Blue, improbable blue, made up of a billion different blues which always seem to roll away into one, just one blue. It’s a colour only those of us who see it from space can know.

[Pause]

It made a big impression on Daddy, that’s for sure. Couldn’t stop talking about it when he got back. Still can’t. That’s why I hate all the critics and cynics. They don’t hear him the way I do. They don’t see the converted man. The love affair he began with the planet straight after his first trip. But then, they don’t want to. Make a million, they laud you to the skies. Make a billion, they start getting anxious. Make a trillion…

[Pause]

[Gloomily] I wish Mum would give him a break, just for once. The fuss she kicked up about him flying me up here! He rebuilt the whole space station, didn’t he? Redesigned the old bits, figured out some new bits, paid for the whole lot himself. He’s not going to put me anywhere unsafe. I’m his only girl! I’m their only girl. Even if they can’t stand to mention each other anymore.

[Sighs]

I hate being in the middle of stuff like this. She’s down there, with half his money, frantic, pouring it into anything that’ll work, anything that’ll buy us a bit more time. He’s up here, in his element, running the final checks while dangling a last few raffle tickets over the planet below. Cue the screaming. [Dad voice] “Bridge to Mars: Make Space for Planet Earth!” [Mum voice] “Stay Grounded: Help our Planet Breathe Again!” No one mentions it, but I know I’m supposed to decide. Go back down there with her, or go on out there with him. No pressure. Just the whole world watching to see which way I’ll jump.

[Pause]

I know what I want to do. At my age, who wouldn’t? Out here it hums with opportunity. Not like down there, where every way you turn someone’s trying to stop you, check on you, tally up your steps, measure your every little breath. I know they have to. I know that every atom matters now in the Great Carbon Accountancy Drive. It’s just… it’s no sort of a life. Not if you dream big. Like Dad does. Like I do.

[Pause]

Thing is, you’ve got to believe. You’ve got to trust that somewhere somehow a solution will be found. Humanity’s always pulled through, hasn’t it? Always found newer, cleverer ways of fixing things when all hope seems gone. So why doesn’t Mum get that? Why can’t she see that Dad’s part of the solution? It’s like he says, the more we expand up here, the less we expend down there. Just a trickle at first, it has to be. There’s only so many people you can load onto a rocket and cram into a cluster of airtight domes. These things take time. No-one’s “running away”. No-one’s “escaping their responsibilities”. [Darkly] She would turn it into a trust thing. Classic Mum, make the whole planet share your abandonment issues.

[Pause]

If I look down there with her eyes, what do I see? It’s true, those huge build-ups of cloud – crowding, bunching together, then coiling around to swallow themselves – they come more often now, fed by great trails of smoke from the ground. Follow those down and you can see them, red and orange blots over the land, they move, like mites on the skin, little by little, with every orbit. And there, off the coasts, that ghostly finger running along the edges of the reefs, white enough to see from space, just as they said it would be. And inland, brown, dark brown, great patches where the maps still show green. That’s something you have to be up here to believe. I know what she’d do if she was here now. Take my hand and say ‘Look. Understand. How can you think of leaving?’

[Pause]

But she’s not here, and I’m not her girl anymore. I’ll take the ship to Mars because I know Daddy’s right, that sometimes it’s the hardest departure that makes the return worthwhile. Goodbye for now, good Earth! I’ll keep faith with you from far away. Even now, as the clouds break up over the ocean, I can see your old colour coming back into view. I choose to believe it’ll be there when I return. That they won’t let you come to harm while I’m gone.