The Echo (22 page)

‘It moved, not us.’

‘That’s what Tomas tells me.’

‘And he’s sure?’

‘He’s sure.’ I watch Hikaru. He looks around every part of his side of the ship. He doesn’t look at the anomaly wall, at where I should be. It’s nothingness; I don’t think that I would want to look into it either, not if I was in his shoes. This feels like hostage negotiations, I think: he is suddenly a man on the edge. I don’t want to say the wrong thing, but I have no idea what the wrong thing is. ‘We were both asleep. Maybe it’s related to that.’

‘Was Tomas awake?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘And you trust him? There’s no way he would have done this. No way he would have moved the ship.’ Tomas is listening, because he must be. He is always listening. ‘Or, you know, not moved us backwards, when he saw what was happening. He’s not so fucking driven, so desperate to get answers, that would never have made him do this.’

‘He didn’t,’ I say. ‘And we’ll get you out of there.’

‘Like we have with Inna,’ he says.

‘That’s different,’ I reply. ‘You aren’t dead.’

‘Yet.’ He doesn’t look up. He looks so grey.

‘Listen, now that we have you on the inside, working out what this thing is will be much easier.’ He rubs his face with his hands, his whole head. Running his fingers through his hair. I’ve lost him, I think; and then the banging starts. She’s back.

‘What’s that?’ Hikaru asks.

‘It’s Inna,’ I say. I won’t lie to him.

‘She’s still outside.’ He turns and pushes towards the doorway, down the hall. I chase him, slower than he is. Still less able. I drag myself along the rail and I watch him, and I shout. ‘We thought it was safer, because we didn’t know what we were going to do. We didn’t know how affected you were!’ He ignores me. I get to be in the hallway and watch him bring up a terminal, so I do the same. I tap to lock the door, to enter the override code that only Tomas and I know, but the system rejects it. It’s on the other side of the anomaly; I cannot do anything. The equivalent of the static, I suspect. ‘Hikaru,’ I say, ‘I want her back just as much as you, but this could ruin the entire mission.’

‘You can’t leave her out there to die,’ he says. She isn’t really even dead. I don’t know if she is even really alive. I see him hammer the buttons to start the airlock cycle, almost in rhythm with Inna’s hammering on the side of the ship. He speaks to her through the comms as the door opens. ‘Inna,’ he says, ‘you should come in now.’ He’s her white knight; the one who saved her. I am the one who stood on the other side of the fence.

‘Hikaru,’ I say, ‘be careful what we tell her. About what’s happened. It could be distressing to her.’

‘I won’t lie to her,’ he says. The banging stops, and there’s a different sound. Pawing. Scraping, the noise of Inna dragging herself along the hull.

‘I will,’ I say. And then there she is: gasping in her helmet, even though she has enough air. Inside, then, and frantically looking around. Hikaru shuts the door behind her, and the air floods into the room, and she pulls off her helmet and presses the walls of the decompression room as the helmet floats about behind her.

‘You saved me,’ she says. She is weak and tired, gasping in as her lungs get used to this. He reaches for her and props her up and pulls her to the rail and helps her take hold of it. I am pathetic. She is crying so hard. ‘What’s happened?’ she asks. She pulls at the straps of her suit, tugging the zip down, and the suit peels away from her chest and shoulders. Her bird tattoo: I had forgotten. Where does it go? What does it mean? ‘Mira,’ she says. ‘Come and help me, please.’ She looks at me, but I stay where I am.

‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I just can’t.’

I explain everything to her, apart from how many times she has died. That can come later. Hikaru watches me while I talk to her, and I wonder if he will be the one to say it. He has brought her in from the cold; maybe he will tell her the truth. If he does, he can be the one to deal with that. When she was outside and I told her, I saw how it ruined her. To know, suddenly, that death means nothing inside the anomaly: it must change you. (I have thought about it myself, but I am so distant from it: I have tried to consider the implications, what it might do to the mind, but until faced with the very real possibility of what the anomaly offers, I cannot firmly contemplate how I might feel.) She will find out eventually, I know, but that doesn’t have to be now. Hikaru doesn’t say anything to her: instead, he says that he needs some quiet. He says that he needs to think. I don’t think he believes that we are ever getting home, at this point. I tell myself that I will tell her eventually, when we’re free of this and headed home. If that is possible, then so too will the truth be.

Instead now I tell her that she passed out. I truncate time, and say that Tobi and Lennox have not long been dead. That Wallace killed himself just after that, and that Hikaru and I have been trying to get her back ever since. She doesn’t question the timescale, because she’s just happy to be back on the ship. She is wrapped in a towel, having showered, and she coughs and sips from a water bottle she keeps tethered to her wrist, nibbles at a food bar. She is ravenous, she says. As she eats, slowly, so slowly, I explain about the anomaly wall, and how she and Hikaru are stuck that side of it.

‘It seems safer that I stay outside it for as long as possible,’ I say. She presses a hand to the wall. She’s sitting on a chair opposite me, strapped down.

‘So what is this anomaly, then?’ she asks. She looks so tired. She and Hikaru both, but it shows even more on Inna. Where you can see the surgery scars, suddenly, as the skin slightly sags over their thin laser-lines; and where she tries to smile but the skin won’t allow it, because it’s been too smoothed over. She is in her tank-top, and the bird reaches for her neck, its beak only slightly parted. I’m sure that there’s a hint of a tongue in there. ‘You must know something now.’

‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘You know how often we can’t explain something?’ She doesn’t reply; it’s rhetorical. ‘Never,’ I say. ‘Because we make up explanations. We take whatever we’ve got and apply logic and get somewhere.’

‘I want to go home,’ she says.

‘So do I,’ I say, but I do not know if that is true. Not without answers. Because what are we without answers?

Hikaru agrees to run the tests I ask of him, even though he questions their point. Now, I can tell that he is lost in himself. He is not the man that he once was, but he understands enough of how this has to work. He has no control, and he is like all of us: expendable. While he sends pings out from the front of the ship that is inside the anomaly, Inna examines the bodies of our dead comrades. She says that she is only making sure that they’re preserved, but I suspect that she wants to ensure that there hasn’t been any foul play. She says that she trusts me, but there will always be a doubt. I catch only a glimpse of Lennox’s charred arm before I stop watching her examination. She asks me about Wallace, about what drove him to do it. I tell her that some people can’t cope with the unknown. She doesn’t buy it. I have asked myself the same question, over and over. What piece of knowledge pushed him over the edge in the end?

The day is quiet and strangely muted. It’s almost as if nothing happened, and we’re a crew getting on with this. I don’t know, really, how I expected this trip to go. Maybe that we would have come to the anomaly and found nothing, that would have been ideal. Not for science, but for the safety and state of the crew. Maybe it could have turned out to be the equivalent of the aurora borealis: a trick of the light, a convergence of science that gave us something strange but harmless. (Does that mean that I see the anomaly as harmful? Intrinsically, in itself? I don’t know. Every pain it has caused has been our own. It is simply the iceberg that collided with the
Titanic
.) The anomaly would have been something that we could shrug off, and we would learn from, and there it would lie: charted in the stars, plotted for eternity, as something that we would name – Hyvönen, maybe, the Hyvönen Anomaly – and that would always be there. People would search for it in the skies with their high-powered garden telescopes, to look for that ripple, like the haze of heat rising from tarmac, only stretched across the stars, and they would wait for the optimal conditions to see it, as they do with meteors and planets. It would be a thing that existed past us, longer than us. Our name would be unfaltering. That would have been a result: past the excitement of the trip, and the thrill of this whole endeavour, a thing that we could name and be remembered by. Science in its essence.

I remain desperate to stay awake. I cannot keep this up forever, I know. I don’t know why I am so scared of sleeping now. I am worried, perhaps, that if I wake up I will have missed something: another death, or myself becoming swallowed by the anomaly. And I cannot take a shower, even though I desperately need one, because it is on their side. I am itching from the dirt and sweat, my scalp and pubic region needing a wash. Instead I take bottles of recyc-water, and I go to the engine rooms. I strip and spray the water at myself, all over, rub myself with a bar of soap and then try as best I can to wash it off; as the water tries to follow the lack of gravity and flee I catch what I can to smooth it across myself. I am also growing a beard. I can see it in the mirrors of the screens, but I am not able to judge what it looks like for myself. Inna says that I look distinguished, but I do not necessarily believe her. The beard itches as it comes through. Inna has offered to find and give me the shaver, but I don’t need it. I think I like this. I like the idea of, when we land, me looking completely different to Tomas. He will have the birthmark; I will have the beard. I spray the water all over me, onto my head, my face, my groin and armpits, my arse. This can’t be hygienic, having the waste float around me like this, drifting into the engines and the walls. I dress and avoid it, and then step outside the room before decompressing it. I listen as the air and water and whatever’s spewed off my body are sucked out into the vacuum. I leave it sucking everything out for far longer than I need to. There is something curiously comforting about the thought of a vacuum.

I take another stim. I remember when you used to have to wait for headache pills to kick in. Now, they’re working as soon as you even touch the tablet, surging through from fingertips to nerves in the most fluid and driven of motions. The stims bolster me. Everything is perfectly clear for a while. I squander that clarity by myself in the lab.

I watch Inna on the monitors when I am not with her. There is something about her that I want to clarify. I want to run tests on her, and I want to hold her and reassure her. The two can be attached and interchangeable, I suspect. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that she has died too many times to even be real, now.

I am forced to piss into bottles. I do this by myself, in the engine rooms. This is my private indignity. When I return, I find Inna sitting at the table, a screen pulled out in front of her. She’s watching the footage that we recorded of her dying. Playing back that moment of pure nothing over and over.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks. Hikaru is crammed into the cockpit, asleep in his chair, leaning up against the anomaly wall. ‘How many times did it happen?’

‘So many,’ I reply. ‘Too many.’

‘And you didn’t rescue me.’

‘We couldn’t.’ I know how weak this is going to sound before I even say it; how she will resent this, because I would. Anybody would, knowing as she did that they were left to die. ‘You were on that side, and we were here,’ I say. ‘And we had to stay where we were because it seemed like the only chance we would have of getting you back.’ I don’t say: and ourselves. If we went in there to get you, we would all have been stranded.

‘You’ve got me back now,’ she says. ‘You could have come and done this straight away, couldn’t you?’ She rewinds it and zooms in: her face as she dies. That moment where it stops, where the terror and screaming give way to something like peace, but it’s an accident. And then the scratch and blank frame and she reappears, her eyes opening like it’s morning and she’s been asleep, and then she realizes the enormity of the situation.

‘We haven’t got you back,’ I say. ‘You are still in there. I am out here. We can’t go home.’

‘We haven’t tried,’ she says. ‘We haven’t even tried yet.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘We need results from inside the anomaly. We have to get them, and then we can try. I am so sorry.’

‘You aren’t sorry, Mirakel,’ Inna says. Every r, so softly rolled. She stays looking down.

‘Ask Tomas when we can leave,’ Hikaru says. He has been awake the whole time. ‘I’ve asked him, but he won’t give us an answer. Do that for us.’ He doesn’t sit up. He stays in the chair, his eyes still shut, and that’s the end of the conversation.

I float in the lab and begin talking to Tomas. ‘I want to see you,’ I tell him, and I wait.

‘What?’

‘Initiate video,’ I say, and the call goes through. I wait: the bandwidth isn’t built for this, and the resolution is terrible, and the lag almost makes this unworkable. I sit back and wait, and there he is, recognizable even when he is so pixelated: my brother. He is in that suit, just as I thought, but he’s not comfortable in it. He straightens his hair and stubs out a cigarette in the glass ashtray behind him. He smoked long before they made them harmless, and it’s a habit he’s thrilled to revel in. It’s funny: his birthmark is how I see myself, I think. That here is my point of reference for how we look, even though my face is clear. Never even a spot of acne, nothing on it but the skin – and, now, the beard, of course – but I can still tell that this is having an effect on him. That, maybe, the calm in his voice is an act. His tie is loosened; his top button undone. The image is broken and only three twenty by three twenty, maybe, but still: I can see him.

‘This is a surprise,’ he says. ‘What do you want, Mira?’ Behind him, a crowd: they peer and try to see the screen. It will be just as low-res on his screens, I know. He could have stretched it out; filled the wall, even. He puts his earpiece in, so that only he can hear me. ‘We’re just as busy as you are, you know.’