The Echo Read online

  ‘How is she?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Tobi says. ‘Freaked out, maybe.’ She nods at Inna, who lifts a screen to Tobi’s face. It mirrors Tobi’s eye back at her. I can see it from here as well: the sclera completely red, the cornea and pupil a muddy brown, floating in the midst of the bloody mess. I can see Tobi struggle to hold it together, her eyelid twitching, but she manages. ‘How did it happen?’ she asks. Her voice sounds dulled and slow, and somehow using a slightly lower register than usual. Perhaps she is still sedated, or the effects are wearing off: I can imagine Inna wanting to ease her into this, in case the shock causes a relapse of whatever her fit before was.

  ‘It’s nothing to be scared of. Sometimes, bleeds can happen in the eye. They’re as full of veins as the rest of you, and they’re tiny. It was most likely the pressure up here.’ She says that as if there’s a direction. So curious: we call space Up, and yet we’re just as likely to be below where we started at any given time. Up makes it easier to understand, I suppose. ‘It’ll pass. I’ve checked that it’s nothing insidious, and it’s not. It’s just a bloody vein. Like a cut, but it shouldn’t even hurt. Does it hurt?’

  ‘No,’ Tobi says.

  ‘And it won’t affect your vision. It’s just a bleed. You’ll be fine, honestly.’

  ‘Just a bleed,’ Tobi repeats. She pulls on her cheek, pulling it down so that she can see as much of her eye as possible. She looks from left to right, and she blinks, as if that might suddenly fix it. ‘I thought I was dying,’ she says. According to her file she’s survived two plane crashes. Maybe that was different. She rolls the eye around, looking to see if the red ends anywhere. ‘Is it a bad one?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Inna says. ‘I’m more worried about the fitting. You’ve had that before?’

  ‘When I was younger,’ Tobi says.

  ‘It wasn’t on your records,’ Inna says.

  ‘It nearly stopped me getting into the air force. But I was tested. I was cleared.’

  ‘Must be the pressure up here,’ Inna says. ‘Don’t worry about it. We can keep it under control.’ She smiles at Tobi: this isn’t her fault. ‘I’ll be back,’ she says, and she leaves Tobi magnetically clipped to the bed. Inna pulls herself over to me, smiling, but I can tell that she doesn’t mean the curves at the edge of her mouth.

  ‘You slept well?’ she asks.

  ‘Fine,’ I say.

  ‘Sunspots gone?’

  ‘Gone,’ I tell her. I blink a few times, to check, but my vision’s clear. Tobi has taken my cross. ‘She’s okay?’

  ‘Did you know that she was ill when she was a child?’

  ‘No, Tomas did the medical checks. Wait,’ I say. I call him, but Simpson answers. He asks what’s wrong, and I tell him nothing. I tell him I’ll call back later, as if he is just down the road, as if this is all meaningless. ‘Is she okay? Can she perform her duties?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ Inna says. ‘But I didn’t have it logged. I am meant to know if there’s something could go wrong.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t you know any of the medical conditions on this ship?’ she asks.

  ‘Tomas did it all,’ I say again. ‘I focused on the technical side. I am more like that, I think.’ She is quiet. She looks into my eyes, examining me, checking that I’m okay. ‘My gut is still churning,’ I say.

  ‘You’re probably hungry,’ she says. ‘You should eat something. We’ve eaten without you. We thought we should leave you to sleep. We asked Tomas, and he agreed.’ I was cut out of the loop, I think. I was, for a second, useless to them.

  ‘Did you sleep as well?’ I ask. I don’t want to be the only one who is struggling. I want them all to be crumbling, and I will be the glue.

  ‘For a few hours,’ she says, but I think that she’s lying. I detach myself and she reaches out her hand. She pulls me to the side, to the bar, as if I need her help. I cling on, and try to stretch out – back pushed forward, feet pointed, arms reaching for the side. I wonder if I look as ungraceful as I feel. ‘You’ll get used to this,’ she says, meaning everything, not just the lack of gravity.

  ‘I’m no good at it,’ I say.

  ‘You’re getting there,’ she lies again. I wonder if it’s something she does a lot: professional falsity. Or, maybe, it’s something she does with me, to make me feel better. A happy leader is a successful leader.

  ‘I am useless. I have never been one of those people with balance.’ This hurts more than I thought it would, because I am tensing all my muscles. I let go of the side-rail and drift out, and I crane my whole body around, trying to turn. If I can turn I can control this better, I think. I see Tobi, still there on her bed. Her eye is as if she’s been shot. Wallace is with her, consoling her. He is making her laugh, or he is laughing and she is watching him, but she is moving on. Rallying herself. I get distracted, and suddenly I’m not near the rail. Inna’s hand grabs me and pulls me back.

  ‘Easy to get adrift. No walks until you’re steady with this, okay?’

  ‘Like you could stop me,’ I say.

  ‘Try me.’ I feel more stirring; my gut, my groin. My entire body, reaching out for something more than I currently have. I look away, towards the cockpit, where Hikaru is either still on duty or back on duty, and Lennox is keeping him company. They are not talking, though: instead they are running the tests. It’s constant, testing. This is the difference between our mission and whatever it was they were doing on the Ishiguro.

  ‘I should see if they’re all right,’ I tell Inna.

  ‘Want a push over there?’ She is playful with it, but I am too uneasy, still. I have no desire to make a fool of myself any more than I already have.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ll crawl.’ She pulls her hands back and swats them together, as if washing them clean of me, and she pushes off, back towards Tobi. She puts her hand on Tobi’s back to console her, and Tobi looks at her with her one bloody eye, and she pulls a face: resilient and powerful. I cling on for what feels like minutes, and then wonder if I can’t move on.

  This is a mission. It has always been clear to us, to Tomas and myself, that it is, and that it should be treated with the utmost seriousness. It may not be glorious, not yet, but there has never been an actual mission to space. Before this, everything was simply to see if we could do it. It was a desire, a proving of ourselves as a collective people. Breaking Earth’s atmosphere? We can reach it. The moon? We can land on it. It was showing off, puffing out our chests, planting flags. This time, there is a reason to be here. The Ishiguro was the most selfish, vainglorious expedition. Dr Singer’s research was only an afterthought, a bonus thing that he could do while they were up there. It didn’t matter, because what mattered was how shiny the crew were, how beautiful, how unstable.

  We have a task, and it’s hugely important. I look at the results of the anomaly while we are up here, and I think that we do not know what this is: that it is so far beyond our comprehension that this discovery, this mission, it could change everything. It could be the thing that realizes our position in the universe. People search their entire lives for an answer, and maybe this is it: maybe this anomaly might give us a clue as to our beginnings. It will not be showy, and it will not be glorious, but it might be an answer.

  A scientist wants nothing more.

  We spend the day running tests. One of the things that we can do, as we get closer to the anomaly, is to discover its span: to see how wide it is, what expanse of space it actually covers. We have measured it from Earth, of course, plotting the space that it doesn’t fill, but from here we can be exact. Accuracy is easier up close. Wallace and Lennox and myself establish the equipment and run the software. The ship will do everything once the programs start running. We have scanners on here, deep-range systems that will be able to search further than anyone has ever searched. It’s a grab bag, a huge potluck of whether you get anything useful or not. When the software is running, Wallace shows myself and Lennox how it works, even thoug
h I already know. I helped design it. There is a room dedicated to my work: the lab, I called it in the early days of development. A room off the corridor, opposite the changing rooms and the airlock, and small, but enough space for the screens that I will need. Above all it is somewhere quiet for me to work. When the software is running, both Wallace and Lennox go to get some sleep. I stay here alone and attach myself to the bench in front of the console. I bring up the screens: 3D visualizations of the results from the pings being sent out, a map of the area of space we’re charting being drawn and constructed in real-time, and I’m able to zoom and pan and focus and highlight it as much as I like. I see the outline of the anomaly starting to be drawn: a patch of nothingness amongst the stars in the distance, surrounded by space. I spin the scene with my fingers, look at it from every angle, and I call Tomas.

  ‘This is incredible,’ I say to him.

  ‘I know,’ he says. He has an exact replica of my screens on Earth, showing him real-time – or as close to real-time as the lag will allow – what I am looking at.

  ‘Did you know about Tobi?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t important, I didn’t think. It was a long time ago. We certainly didn’t expect it again.’

  ‘I would have thought it enough to not let her up here.’ I can trace each ping from here, and watch them: little orange dotted lines, pushing out like digital ticker-tape. They disappear, and another part of the anomaly is confirmed: an area of space that we cannot see, that barely exists. ‘But you made the call.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘She was the best person for the job. I don’t mind there being something wrong with you if you’re the best person for that particular job. I honestly never thought that it would be a problem, Mira.’ He is silent. I imagine him leaning over his computer, bent towards the screen, examining the visualization of this. Watching the pings that I watched fifteen seconds before, as the data reaches him. ‘You’ll have to deal with it.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Is there anything else I need to know about any of the others?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Would it matter if there was?’

  ‘What if she had died?’ I ask. An orange line flies past the anomaly and carries on into the distance: traced away, so small that I will never see it. The result of what it finds will return to us when it does: eventually it will stop. Maybe it will stop so far away that we will no longer even be receiving data when it sends itself back. That we, humanity, will no longer even be alive.

  ‘Well, she didn’t,’ Tomas says. ‘She is fine. Bruised and embarrassed, but she’s fine.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. I spin the anomaly again. We have no way of knowing how deep it is, because we have to imagine that it is a wall, and there is no way of seeing what’s behind it. ‘Does it scare you?’ I ask. ‘This anomaly? Whatever it is.’ I wait for a reply, but one doesn’t come. ‘Are you there?’ I ask, but nobody answers, not even Simpson; which means that Tomas is still sitting at his desk, still at the computer, but he’s simply choosing to stay quiet.

  I stay and watch the lines. This is such a process: like tracing the outline of a planet with the ends of strings of thread. Tomas and I wrote an algorithm to plot the pinging of this thing. The intention was, it would find likely areas and match them, following lines and trying to extrapolate the size of it that much faster. There is a game you play when you are children, Battleship: you pick a place that your opponent might have placed their ship, a number on a grid that you cannot see, and you hope that you will somehow pick the right space. If you do, you extrapolate the rest of the ship based on that: moving up or down or left or right, assuming the likely choice that they have made, hoping for another hit and to sink their ship. We played it a lot, Tomas and I. It was the perfect way for us to test how much we thought alike: how much we had to work to outfox the other. I imagine him, watching these with me, or slightly delayed; or maybe not. Maybe gone from the lab, finally heading home to his baker, to spend time with her. Forgetting about me, about this, about us, for an evening. Thinking of this as work, not what it actually is.

  I switch the screens off. I don’t need to watch this. If he is still with me, so be it. I detach myself and push off, and I struggle at the ceiling, but then I push myself through to the corridor, and then down to the living quarters. The ship is quiet. Four of the bed lids are down and darkened, and only Tobi is still awake. I drag myself through, trying to make as little noise as possible, and she turns her head to watch me gracelessly approach. I settle in the seat next to her and clip myself in. She yawns and nods at me. I feel secure for a second. It’s nice, after the chaos of floating, to have this security. She is confident, and taking back control.

  ‘How long do you reckon we’ve been up here now?’ she asks. She puts her hand over the clock on the screen and looks at me. ‘No cheating, take a guess,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘See if you can guess. I couldn’t. I can’t tell if it’s only been a day, or if it’s longer. Everything becomes loose here, you know? Without the sunrise, without the sunset. Without defined bedtimes. And I feel tired all the time, whatever I’m doing. And that’s not my eye or whatever. Even just sitting here, that feels tiring.’ She turns back and looks at the screen, focusing on the expanse of nothing that’s in front of us. The view that offers precious little sensation that we’re even moving, so large is space and so small are we. She reveals the clock.

  ‘We should try to think of it in terms of hours here, hour to hour, rather than concentrating on the days. Back home, that’s where they need days,’ I say to her.

  ‘Yeah, maybe. Maybe.’ She yawns again. ‘But everything is looser. Time, speed, place. Everything. If you focus on a star you can see it move, if you stare at it. Or, you know, you can see us moving.’ I do as she says. I pick one – Algol, in Perseus – and I stare at it. I plot where it is in relation to the rest, and to the console and the frame of the window, and then I keep staring. Over time, and I have no idea how long that time is, it shifts, or we do. Such an infinitesimally small amount, barely perceptible. Barely registering. ‘It’s humbling, I think,’ Tobi says. ‘But at least we’re definitely moving.’

  ‘You walked away from two crashes,’ I say.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Were you scared? How did you do it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asks.

  ‘You were scared, with your eye,’ I say. She reaches up and touches it. ‘But back then.’

  ‘Well, now. See, I couldn’t do anything about the eye. If something had gone inside me, that’s not a thing I alter myself. If I was dying, not like I could change that. If I was dying then, that was it. Boom, dead.’ She rubs it, as if she can feel the wound. ‘With the crashes, that was in my own hands. All I could do was try to save myself.’

  I stay sitting next to her. Neither of us talks after that.

  Wallace, when he wakes up, asks me to go to the engines with him. He is proud of them. They are one of the few parts of the Lära that we avoided directly working on, once we had told him our brief. We helped him assemble his team and they designed them. There were stipulations – cost, consumption, having to work alongside the piezoelectric life-support systems – but they had carte blanche after that. He shows me them, because he wants my approval. He wants me to see how impressive they are, and how well they have worked. He waits by them, and he runs diagnostics. Now, they’re doing nothing: our plan is that we will not stop until we reach the anomaly, and we’re coasting off the momentum that we established with the initial acceleration. The boosters stop us accelerating any more – or, at least, stop us moving out of our allotted safety zone of acceleration – so, for the most part, the engines spin quietly. They are ready to stop us, when needed, but now he can run checks and tests, and, as he tells me, try to optimize them out here, to do real-world work on them that was impossible back on Earth.

  ‘It’s good,’ I tell him. ‘You do what you want to, okay? I trust you on this.’
>
  ‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘Appreciate it.’ But he doesn’t look away, and he doesn’t ready himself with work. ‘Look, I have a favour to ask,’ he says. ‘I’m missing my girls.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  ‘Would it be all right if I called them?’ He has a wife and two daughters. They live in a house in Orlando. His wife is a teacher and his daughters are both at the school she now works at. I try to remember any other facts from his file. ‘It’s Karly’s birthday tomorrow. On the eighteenth. I just wanted to give her a call, say hello to them all.’

  ‘I, uh. Listen,’ I say. We have rules. They are allowed to pass on messages or have messages passed by Tomas or the ground crew, because that’s the only approval for bandwidth we have. He knows that. I don’t want to have to say it.

  ‘No, sure, it’s okay.’ He is saving me from having to. He is lost, for a second, not making eye contact with me. ‘I know, you let me, you’ll have to let them.’

  ‘You know how it is,’ I say. I cannot stand this. I cannot abide this conversation: not just the favour he’s asked, but the very being part of it. I want out. ‘I have to get back and check on the others,’ I say, and he nods, so I go. I move down the corridor and I leave him there by himself.

  ‘Problem?’ Tomas asks. He has been listening in. I want to tell him to stop, but we designed the system so that he could; so that, were it me down there, I could, if I wanted to. Complete mission parity. Completely open.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘He’s lonely.’

  ‘Aren’t we all,’ Tomas says. I picture him with his baker. I do not say what I am thinking.

  I want to sleep, but I cannot. I lie there and I think about what this means, and the pressure. There is always something coming, here. I have to be at my best, and that is my worry: if I do not sleep, I will function at some percentage of my absolute ability, and I could ruin everything. I get out of bed, and nobody is looking, and I contemplate staying awake; but there is another option. In the medical cupboard, the hypos with the sedative. We have so many shots, delivered in tiny liquid capsules which are then injected into the neck before dissolving; and they are harmless, non-addictive. Before, Inna administered them, but, I reason, how hard can it be? I am not scared of needles. Needles are a necessary evil. I load one into the hypo and try to find the spot she pushed it into my neck before, where there is still a pock-mark on the skin; and I hold the injector there and push the button. When I have done the first I make a choice: to take another, straight away. Two to settle me, to ensure that I am down. I inject it into the same spot; this one stings a little more. I get back to my bed and I begin to count, and I am gone. This works. This has really worked, and I can sleep, and be safe.