The Echo. James Smythe
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.
‘Wake up, Brother,’ Tomas says. ‘We’ve found something you’re going to want to see.’ He opens the bed for me, and I’m alone in the sleeping area. ‘Come to the lab,’ he says, which means it’s something related to the anomaly. He was meant to wake me first, before anything was announced, before any decisions were made. We were both meant to be there at the start of these things.
I have an erection, so I dress myself, pulling on the thick trousers designed to regulate our temperatures, and I desperately need to piss but that can wait, because I’ve obviously already missed something that he thinks is important. Down the corridor, all their voices coo as I float down, clinging to the bars. I think of myself as a trainee ballerina. Pointe. Demi something. Stupid. I should have been here.
I wonder if Tomas has done this on purpose.
One of the screens has been extended to fill the length of the wall, and they’re all peering at it. It looks like nothing at first; as if it’s been switched off. But then Inna turns to me, and smiles. She holds her hand out to usher me to the front.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she asks. I peer at it, and then I see it.
It’s the anomaly. I can’t tell the scale, so I shift the screen to a more scientific view – and they groan as the grid pulls itself over the image, a scientific sheen over this thing of natural beauty, but then I can see how far away it is, and still how large, even at this immense distance – and then I see the edges of it. It’s like a sheet of something that sits in the middle of the nothing: a pulled, taut sheet, where the corners and edges ripple like waves. And the texture – admittedly we’re far out, and this resolution, as much as we can see, isn’t going to be entirely trustworthy – but it’s like oil, somehow. It’s black, but not like the colour of space. Space isn’t true black. When you look at it, sure, that’s what it seems. But when you examine it, it’s got colour and light bouncing around inside it. It’s lit, and the blackness you can see is just a temporary absence of light. This is a different sort of black, painted or created, but I’ve never seen anything darker. I’ve never seen anything this pure before.
‘This is from the bounce?’ I ask. We have a chain of satellites between us and the anomaly. Tomas and I spent a year setting them up, sending them out and getting them roughly where we wanted them to be. They bounce visual data, downscaling it at each choke-point. The bounce is how I can talk to Tomas from here; and now we are finally close enough to see this in a resolution that lets us make out details.
‘It is,’ Tomas says. ‘We are finally close enough.’ Any chance of this being as incredible as I know it is – because it’s never been seen on a live feed, not like this; and that fact alone essentially means it’s never been truly seen full stop, as that’s how humans work – is diminished by seeing this last. It is, to me, like being told the ending at the start of the story.
‘We couldn’t sit on our hands while you slept,’ Tomas replies. I wonder how this reads to the rest of the crew. How antagonistic they think he is, or I am.
‘No,’ I say, but I can taste the lie in my own mouth, and feel myself brimming with anger. ‘Of course not. You were right to continue.’
‘We woke you up as soon as we were close enough to see this thing, and when we had processed the picture properly. We had to be sure.’ Of course you were sure. Of course you waited. I call up the readings from the ping, try to compare it to the pictures we have received from the satellites. The ping is working, giving us something resembling an edge, numbers,