The Echo

‘I’m queasy,’ I say. ‘It happens.’

‘Everything looks wonderful from down here. Perfect. I’d say that this has been a triumph, wouldn’t you?’ He sounds thrilled. I can hear the grin in his voice – big, toothy grin, bending his cheeks, stretching and bending his birthmark. A clap of his hands together. ‘So now we’ve all got a job to do.’

‘Yes,’ I say. I don’t say anything else, and his pause is longer, as if he’s waiting for me to.

‘I’m going to get some sleep. Go home; it’s been a long day. Simpson is taking the post here now, okay? You need anything, you call him.’

‘Sure,’ I say, but he knows that I won’t. I can handle anything that comes up. And then he’s gone, and I’m alone again. I’m incredibly tired as well; hearing him saying it does something to me, like the involuntary contagion of a yawn. I shut my eyes, still floating there. Why can I sleep now? Why is it that when I am needed I could drift off and allow myself to be gone? Tobi shouts that she is hungry: I am startled awake. I don’t know if I could eat, not feeling like this.

‘Our first meal,’ she says. ‘Feels like we should have some sort of ceremony.’ They all float to the table, and I unclip myself. I have to join them, to stress my leadership, my skill here. I need their respect; Tomas and I long debated the importance of respect amongst a crew. I cling to the rail and I pull myself along towards the central dais table. I can feel them staring at me. They are still humouring me, because grace is something innate, that cannot be taught, but I know that I will have to get used to this. I will have to become better at it, in these confined quarters. On the NISS it was one thing; here, I may even have to go outside the ship, and I need to know that I am capable of that. The table divides the central part of the room. The shape, the construct of the room, is a triple loop, like an infinity symbol doubled-up: three circular rooms on top of each other. The cockpit, the table, the beds: all round. Tomas read books on psychology during the interior design stage of the project, and he read that circular rooms could help to offer an artificial sense of camaraderie. No nooks or crannies to hide in. That’s why the beds can be darkened and made private: in case we need alone time. There’s some wiggle room, but not much. The table has magnets for us to attach our suits to, like everything else. This wasn’t our invention. The suits have ten or so of the magnets, heavy duty, and every fixture and fitting in the ship has the other part. You let the two or so of them meet and voilà, you aren’t going anywhere. ‘Somebody should say something,’ Tobi reiterates. We all wait as Wallace comes back down the corridor and sits himself down.

‘Everything’s fine back there,’ he says. He calls down to Simpson, on the ground. ‘Temperatures exactly how they should be, working at 97 per cent efficiency. Batteries on 98 per cent.’ Better than fine, even: within our optimum parameters.’

‘There. Wallace said something,’ Hikaru says to Tobi. ‘Now we eat?’

‘You know what I mean,’ Tobi says. ‘This is pretty big, right? Being up here?’ They all look to me. ‘This must be one of the best feelings, to see this actually happen. To come to fruition.’

‘It’s good,’ I say. I don’t tell them that my insides are tumbling and churning, and that I can’t balance, and that there’s still these fucking white spots blinking in my peripheral vision. I don’t tell them all that I think I was awake during the acceleration. I try to be inspiring. ‘We’ve got a huge challenge ahead of us, and we’ve got a long way to go. Lesser journeys have destroyed people. You have to remember what we’re here for.’ They’re silent. I pause: feeling sick. As if having my mouth open might be my undoing. They’re waiting, and I can feel the churn, and I think that I have nothing else to say. But then I hear a voice the same as mine pick up where I left off:

‘This isn’t something for your CVs, or to tell your grandchildren. This is a mission for the whole human race. There’s something out there, and it’s our job to find out what it is. This isn’t exploration: it’s discovery. It’s potentially finding the next important thing to push humanity forward. This is Columbus returning to the New World, going back there and saying, This is mine. I found this. Now I’m going to fucking start something.’

I had no idea that Tomas was still there, and listening. He said he was going home, but he didn’t. And he doesn’t say goodbye; he just falls silent. Tobi unclips and opens a cupboard at the side and brings out a box of meal bars.

‘Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub,’ she says.

We worked for the UNSA back before that was what it was even called. Back then it was still a collection of companies and ex-DARPA employees trying to put something new together. We wrote a letter and we spent a summer halfway across the world, suddenly in America, and interning for Gerhardt Singer. It was the summer before he went up in the Ishiguro and never came back. Afterwards, we wrote a letter to his partner saying how honoured we were to have met him, to have studied under him. The things that he taught us. I think that’s why we started research into the areas that we did, to carry on his work. (We didn’t tell him that we thought he played it wrong, and took too many chances. That would have been cruel, I think: he was hampered, and it was not all his fault, the choices that were made.) Dr Singer said to us, before we left him at the end of the summer, that the anomaly was his pet project.

You pick something and stick with it, he had told us. Because, if you focus, there’s a chance that it will be important. Some scientists spread themselves too thin, you know? They try lots of different things, go from pillar to post, and they never settle on the one thing. I think it’s better to have something that’s my life’s work – that might be important – than just generalize and leave nothing. He seemed really sad when he spoke about it, as if he might go his whole life and not discover anything. As it turned out, he died, and we don’t know if he ever discovered what the anomaly was. That seems such an inglorious way to go: out here, in the emptiness, still asking that question you have always asked and never being able to get an answer.

Inna comes to see me as I sit by myself above the expanse. There is a screen embedded in the floor. When we were young, our mother took us on holiday to Greece, and we went in a boat with a glass floor, and we could see right down into the ocean, and we could see the fish and the water, how deep it was. When we were designing, we took that concept and adapted it. We fitted a camera into the underside-exterior of the ship, and we layered a screen into the floor that could show that camera’s feed. Tomas was so excited by the idea. Think about it! he said. It’ll be incredible, to be up there, nothing underneath you. It’ll be like you’re floating. It wasn’t meant to be me, that You, I suspect: I suspect he thought it would be him. He wanted to have it constantly on, a constant hole to space. I said that not everybody would want to see that all the time, want to see that nothingness. He said, There’ll be stars, and I said, Well, they don’t count for that much when they’re that far away. I have seen stars every day from right here. He argued at one point that it should be glass, even: a clear, unfiltered view. I told him that was stupid. There was more chance of something going wrong. Everything that could have been a window is now a screen, linked to an external camera. We took all glass out because it was easier. It meant fewer seals, and less chance of anything going wrong under the pressure we would be exerting.

Now I can sit here and look down and see everything. I’ve called up the trackers, and computer visualizations dart across the glass, highlighting planets and galaxies. They trace comets. They assign names, and they tell me distances that can never – or not in my lifetime, not in this craft and with this crew – be reached. But it makes it look as though the galaxy is somehow that much closer. Somehow almost attainable. Inna stares at the same things that I do, circling around me. She puts her hand onto my shoulder, to steady herself. The skin on her hands – all over her, in fact – it looks younger than she actually is. I wonder if she’s had work done. Everybody has; I would not judge her. It would be sensible, probably. It’s so hard to tell nowadays. If we didn’t have everybody’s details, I wouldn’t put her as older than me, not really. But then, I don’t know if I even look my age. I call up details for the screen for what we’re looking at: the age of the stars we’re travelling past at such speed. It’s guesswork aided by supposition, but some of them – based on their brightness, their distance – some of them we’re pretty accurate on, I think.

‘It’s wonderful,’ Inna says. ‘This is something I never even dreamed that I’d get to see.’ I don’t know if this is her way of thanking me for putting her on this trip. She wrote Tomas and me a letter with her application, talking about how excited she would be. How, when she was a girl, she had always dreamed of this, just as Tomas and I had. That’s how you appeal to us: you say, I am just like you. I understand you and what you are trying to do.

‘Aren’t you scared?’ I ask her. She shakes her head.

‘Not now we are up here. Not in the least.’ She dips the tip of her foot at the screen, stretching forward. It focuses on the star nearest her toe-point, and details that system. The name of it, how far it is, when we first logged it as a race. And then it tells how long it would take to get there. She looks at the number, which extends well beyond our lifetimes, and she laughs. ‘That’s why I’m not scared,’ she says. ‘You look at this, it’s easy to see how big it all is. Much bigger than us. Time is something we have such a limited supply of, and I’d rather do something important with what I have got left.’ Everybody wants glory, I do not say to her. It’s embedded inside us, entrenched deep down as part of what makes us human. Tomas joked, after we spoke to her the first time, that I was attracted to Inna. He said that I was, and I protested, but he is that way. He will drive a point home, and he will insist, because he always believes that he is right. You don’t have a chance, he told me, because she has lived, and she has done so much. She’s so worldly, and look at us. We don’t have a world: we have a laboratory. I said to him, You’ve found somebody, and he said, No, we found each other. It’s a two-way situation, Mira. She’s a baker: her kitchen is as much of a lab as ours is. ‘Do you feel pressure?’ Inna asks me. ‘Do you feel that this is somehow harder, because of what has come before?’ The last successful space flight was nearly four decades ago. We’re fighting against the odds.

‘I don’t get pre-occupied with it,’ I say.

‘But it’s there, isn’t it? Hanging over our heads.’

‘I suppose,’ I say.

‘Like the sword of Damocles.’

‘Yes.’ I turn to her. My own foot brushes the screen-floor, and selects a series of planets, sending the data presented into a whirl. ‘I try to not worry about these things. We have made this as foolproof as it can be. But then, we fools can try and test that.’ I smile. I look for a reaction in her face, to my joke. I am trying these things: I have seen Tomas do them, make jokes and win people that way. He has always been better at that stuff than I have. I am trying.

‘It’s normal that you would be worried,’ she says. ‘You have to remember: there’s no pressure to succeed. We do the best we can do.’ I realize that this isn’t the talk that I thought it was. She isn’t impressed by me. She is professional. Her timetable says that she will perform Day One psychiatric evaluations of us. This is mine. I feel everything sink inside me. The ache in my insides, that I had forgotten about, it comes back. I do not know what to say to her.

Then I am saved: a shout comes from the back of the ship. It’s Wallace’s voice, a howl for help, and Inna unclips herself and races off, pushing off with her feet like a swimmer, shooting down the corridor. I fumble with the magnets holding my glove to the rail, and as soon as I am away from the wall I feel myself rock. I feel the bile inside, even through the pills that Inna gave me. I steady myself. I shut my eyes, and I see the white glimmers, the pulsing in my own eyelids.

‘The sword of Damocles – you know that she used it wrong, don’t you?’ Tomas is speaking to me again.

‘Yes’ I say. Of course I know that. He knows that I know it. ‘You’re back,’ I say, changing the subject. ‘Did you sleep?’ It doesn’t seem as if it can have been long enough. Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps he couldn’t sleep. He ignores my question.

‘People just use it to describe any old situation where there’s pressure or what have you. But Damocles took the king’s place, and then he was the only one on the throne. That’s the point of the story: if you’re not king, you don’t sit on the throne, and the sword will never hurt you.’ I know what he’s going to say, because he’s a fucking shit. ‘We’re the kings here, Mira. She can say it’s hanging over all of them, but you know it’s not.’

‘I know the point of the bloody story,’ I snap. I shut my eyes and I try to breathe more. He hears me, through the earpiece. I pull myself along the railing to the side, and then around the corner, past the table and to the corridor hatch. Tomas is quiet then, and I don’t talk to him any more either, but I know he’s still listening to everything we are saying. Nothing will slip past him.

Down the corridor, they are all shouting, and I cannot tell what is wrong through the noise. I am the last one to respond, the slowest. I breathe. I try to breathe.

Tobi is pressed against the floor, being held down by Wallace, and Inna is grabbing at her arms as they flap around. She is convulsing, and she is uncontrollable; only pinned down because they are holding her, and it is taking Wallace and Lennox both to manage this. I imagine her breaking free from this, drifting and twitching. I think about the Ishiguro, and I pray that she isn’t dying. There is no way we would continue. We would be ordered to turn here and head home, because there would be too much at risk. She would jeopardize this all.

‘What’s wrong?’ I ask. I can’t see her face properly, because she’s moving so much, and her hair – which is short enough anyway, perpetually tied back, as the sensibilities of zero gravity dictate – her hair is mussed all over her face. I catch a glimpse of one of her eyes, and it looks all white, but I cannot tell if that is true or if it is me: the after-images still dance in my own vision. Then she turns her head on a convulsion, as Inna tries to prep a needle for her, and I see that her other eye is dark red. Just the eye, not running down her face: a thick blood-colour in the eyeball itself.

‘Please,’ Inna says, and Wallace and Lennox hold her extra tightly, really struggling for that second. Inna reaches in and presses the hypodermic to her neck and it only takes a second before Tobi goes limp. Lennox and Wallace let go and she starts to drift; her limbs all loose, her back arched. I think of my mother, and her angels: this is, for a second, as if Tobi is ascending. I stare, and Wallace and Lennox pat each other, checking they’re all right.

‘She’s fine,’ Inna says to me, as if she knew that I was about to ask. ‘It’s a subconjunctival haemorrhage. Bleeds can happen when the body is this stressed. Does she have a history of seizures?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘Tomas approved the medical checks, in the, uh, the personnel files.’ We split the tasks up: he took some approvals, I took others. We shared everything, but his memory of these things will be better than mine, I am sure.

He interrupts. ‘No history, doctor,’ he says. His voice comes over the intercom, filling the corridor. It’s jarring: how sometimes he is only in my ear, and sometimes all around us.

Wallace pulls Tobi towards him and folds her up slightly in his arms.

‘Where shall I take her?’ he asks Inna. He holds her like you would a child, maybe, carrying them to bed. He has daughters; I wonder if he carries them like this as well. She convulses slightly still, and her eyelids flicker. I imagine, under them, her one red eye darting left to right. I think that she could shake like this even if she was dead; when we were children, my mother kept chickens: I have seen them killed, their wings beating their sides long after their heads have been taken.

‘We should get her to her bed,’ Inna says. ‘We can secure her there. She’ll be fine when she wakes up.’ So Wallace carries Tobi past us all, and Lennox and Inna follow them. I pull myself along the rail behind. They are like swimmers. This is what it was likened to, in the early lessons. Push off, use your arms to steer and guide yourself, like rudders; use the environment to control your trajectory. That was the first lesson. I didn’t attend the others: there were better uses for my time. Hikaru cranes his neck and looks back from the cockpit section, and he asks how she is.

‘She’s okay,’ I say, and he nods. I feel as if I need to control this more. Otherwise, it could all be in danger of running away from me. We – they – strap her down, fastening her into the bed. Inna checks Tobi’s eye properly while she’s out, looking behind it, then scans her skull. We all stare at the results on the screens, and we’re relieved to hear that she’s clear. Inna tells us that it’s stress, pressure and stress that caused what happened, and nothing else. She opens the other beds up, and she floats above them.

‘This is as good a time as any,’ she says. ‘The rest of you should get some sleep as well. I’ll stay up with Hikaru, keep him company.’ She means: interview him. Take her time talking about who he is, how he feels about this mission. Check he’s okay, because now he might be the only pilot for a while.

‘I can stay awake as well,’ I say. ‘I’m not tired.’

‘Liar.’ She opens the lid of my bed and darkens the glass. ‘You need to sleep. You look like hell.’ That hurts, to hear her saying that. She leans in close to me, so that the others can’t hear. ‘If you truly didn’t sleep when we launched, you will need to now. Don’t argue with me, and go to bed.’ She takes my hand, or the end of my arm, and she drags me off the rail and towards the centre of the room. I let her.

‘Wake me if anything changes,’ I say.

‘We’re in the middle of nothingness, Mira. What’s going to change?’ I lie down and she links the magnets for me, then lowers the bed lid. She watches me until I can’t see her through the dark glass.

‘How long do I sleep for?’ I ask her, through the lid, but she doesn’t answer, and I can’t see out. I don’t like how little I can move in this thing. At home, I sleep on my side. It’s how I’m most comfortable: facing the wall, my back to the expanse of the room. Here, you are forced to lie on your back; and the hardness of the plastic now jars, it all seeming less comfortable than it could be; and the oxygen supply in these things runs slightly too cold. It regulates itself, because we didn’t want blankets or the opportunity to trap yourself in a sweatbox. It regulates itself: another way we have streamlined this whole process. Innovation through automation.

‘She’s forceful,’ Tomas says in my ear. I had forgotten that he was there.

‘I don’t need to sleep,’ I say.