The Echo (11 page)

‘Jesus,’ Wallace says. ‘Huh.’

‘Good find,’ Tomas says.

‘Oh my God,’ Lennox says. He gets closer, almost past me. It’s infectious, his enthusiasm. Makes me feel justified in my own excitement, such as it is. I like him more and more, when he is like this.

‘What do you think it is?’ Tobi asks.

‘I have no idea,’ Tomas says, before I can. ‘Mira?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ I say.

‘A comet or something,’ Tobi says.

‘Inside the anomaly!’ Lennox says. He is working this out. ‘What the hell can it be?’

‘It has to be something,’ I say.

‘It’s definitely not nothing.’ Tomas sounds weary. Like he knew that this was coming. ‘But we should be loath to declare it a something yet.’

‘Tomas,’ I say, ‘it’s moving. It’s got velocity, and a trajectory that seems to almost match ours. We can assume that this is not a coincidence.’

‘And yet space is made up of the things,’ Tomas says. I can hear him shrug. And he speaks with his mouth full of something or other: ‘Being out there, you’re just one in a chain of them. Let’s wait until you’re closer and we can make out what it is.’ I picture him there in the safety and comfort of his stupid fucking launch control room, in that suit of his that he persists in wearing, his pressed black suit trousers and his white shirt and his slicked-back hair, like he’s there in 1969, recreating that schtick, that feeling; and whatever he’s eating, it’s no doubt a gift from his baker, some doughy hand-made pastry. Everything about him is superiority: not just over everybody else, but over me, even though I am his equal in every single way. I know it, and because I know it he must also know it. ‘Let’s come back in twenty-four hours and look at it again,’ he says, and that is that. I know that he won’t take his eyes off it until then; I know that he’ll examine it as closely as I will. For the good of mankind we discover; and yet.

They listen to him. He dampens the crew’s enthusiasm, even though this is something so important. They leave, back into the main body of the ship and their jobs or their sleep, and Inna squeezes my arm, as if to congratulate me for a job well done, and then she watches me from the doorway for a second as I hover in the centre of the room and I stretch the thing out like it was when I was alone. I know that Tomas will be doing the same: strutting around his room, ordering the people desperate to please him to get him coffee, to help him analyse what it is that I have found. He can say that it’s unimportant all he likes: I do not believe him. I have found this. I have. I put a pin in the object. I fold a chair down from the wall and clip myself to it, and I watch the pin, and the whatever it is move away from it. After an hour I move the pin, tracking it, plotting it. I want to be here when the resolution finally clears up enough that we can see what this thing is.

We eat lunch, and I sigh when Inna tells me that I must join them, because it means taking my eyes off the image. Tobi thought that it would be entertaining to eat Hikaru’s food for a meal. She is more herself again: there is a spark in her. It’s the sort of thing that is attractive to people, and she has it. It’s behind her eyes, so we give her this. Her eye is still red, but we have stopped noticing. She has stopped looking at it as well. We are all moving onwards.

‘White lunch,’ she says as she puts the protein bars into our hands. They taste as they look, and we each tear into them knowing that we need the nutrients.

‘Jesus wept,’ Wallace says. ‘This is what you eat?’

‘You wouldn’t believe how good it is for you, for your guts. Your digestive system. So good for your insides.’ Hikaru relishes this. His bar is half gone even as the rest of us are only single bites down.

‘It would have to be, tasting like this.’ He eats it regardless. We don’t talk about the anomaly, but I know that they’re thinking about it, and me. I don’t say a word over lunch, and they keep looking at me. As if I’m about to announce something. As soon as we’ve eaten I unclip myself.

‘I’m going back to the lab,’ I say.

‘Okay,’ Inna says, as if she is giving me permission to leave the table. I push myself back to the corridor and then down to the lab, still clinging to the walls, hopelessly behind the rest of them in my aerial acrobatics – they can spin and twirl and somersault as part of their movement, and still somehow end up where they want to be – and then, in the lab itself, I cling to the console desk and it takes me a few seconds to notice, but the pin that I laid before lunch is still exactly where the thing is: sitting right on top of it. The object hasn’t moved. Whatever it is, it has totally stopped; not even a tiny bit of drift away from the last point it was set at.

‘Refresh the image,’ I say, which the computer does, and it’s still there. I wait, on the highest resolution, to see if it moves again. It doesn’t. I call Tomas, and he answers, tired and lazy-sounding. He is not here: and he is fifteen, thirty seconds behind me in seeing what exactly it is that I am looking at.

‘It’s a ship,’ I say. ‘Inside the anomaly, Tomas. It’s another ship.’

We all watch it. Not one of us takes their eyes off it. In the cockpit, even, the image is stretched across the front windows, and we are all awake. In the living areas, it’s stretched across the screen that we use to show the expanse below: suddenly more impressive than the vastness of space itself. I stay in the lab, because here I can see it all, and I pull up multiple screens showing every aspect. Lennox is working on trying to ping the ship – I call it that, still partially guessing, but this is how we must work – and trying to see if we can get an idea of how deep in the anomaly it actually is.

‘You’re sure about this?’ he asks. Tomas is listening but doesn’t chime in. He’ll have his own people on this. They are working with the lag against them, which is a disadvantage for him.

‘It has to be a ship,’ I say. I feel like I only talk in vagaries, not absolutes. The mark of a good scientist, Tomas used to say, is in the absolutes, though even he is lost here. I can tell because he is silent. For the first time, he is as preoccupied as I am.

‘Could it be aliens?’ Lennox asks.

‘Don’t say that word.’

He laughs. ‘Fine, it has to be something else, then. That’s only logical, right?’ I know exactly what he’s talking about. We all know, all of us. There are very few options, and one of them is that it is the
Ishiguro
. That would mean that it has been out here for over twenty years. It would mean that it is a freak, a fluke. Something that should not be. To see it still moving, and still with power, after so long? And the fact that it has stopped, now, would suggest that it’s crewed still. That cannot be right. The crew would have succumbed long ago. They would have given up, gone insane, run out of food, their muscles and bones atrophied and worn down. No way they’re running off their own batteries – that’s true perpetual energy, there is no way that it can be that – and there is no way that they’ve found fuel. So it’s not crewed, because there will be no life support. But there’s fuel? Perhaps it’s set to a cycle? Back then, the system was entirely run by computer, by a programmed set of instructions designed to be foolproof. There was barely any need for a pilot. It was a totally flawed idea, totally and utterly flawed. You can’t test code in the field like that, not when there’re lives at stake. Not when there’re a mission to be done.

Lennox has raised another screen, a smaller one, and he’s called up an image of the
Ishiguro
. We drag the picture of the ship itself across to the bigger screen, compress it to the right size and lie it on top of the unrecognizable thing, and it’s a perfect fit for the general shape and colour, but other than that we can’t tell. When he isn’t looking, I take another stim, and there’s that rush of a faster frame-rate when I feel like I could do anything, but that fades, and I am still left looking at the same shapes, trying to make them fit.

In the middle of the night, with the rest of the crew asleep, I drift to the cockpit and cradle myself into the seat there, attach the magnets to stop me drifting. It’s Tobi’s shift. She looks over at me, and then reaches into her pocket.

‘Wait,’ she says. She fiddles with her face, and then she pulls back, and I see that she is wearing a patch across it: like a pirate. She laughs out loud, a sudden exclamation of her own amusement. I do not. ‘I found it in the medical stores,’ she says. ‘You like it?’

‘Yes,’ I say. I don’t know if I say it wrong, but she reads it as a lack of amusement, and she turns professional.

‘You need something?’ she asks.

‘We have to change our destination,’ I say. ‘Only slightly, but we have to.’

‘Where to?’ We’ve had a course decided for years now: into the centre of what we understand to be the anomaly. But the ship we’ve found has changed everything: it’s higher, in the scale of things, based on how far we think the anomaly stretches. Still the anomaly. Still our mission, not forgoing that for even a second, but it’s something else. Two birds with one stone, I think. It could be. If it is the
Ishiguro
, if it is inside the anomaly, if it has been for the past two decades, think of what we could learn from it. Think of the things that its sensors could tell us.

‘Plot a course for it.’

‘The other ship?’

‘Yes.’

‘Everybody signed off on it?’ She means Tomas.

‘Yes,’ I say. He hasn’t, but he will. He would. She nods, and she starts typing onto her keyboard, changing what she needs to. She can tweak the trajectory with the boosters; such a subtle change, enacted over the next few hundred miles. Easy as anything. ‘Thank you,’ I say.

‘It’s fine,’ she says. I start to unclip myself, but she stops me. She puts her hand out, blocking me. ‘I have a favour,’ she says.

‘Oh?’ I say. I am thinking about the ship: the screens here are now full of her calculations, and I can’t see it. It could have changed. This could all have changed while I am sitting here, getting away from me, the situation developing.

‘Wallace’s family,’ she says. ‘He really wants to speak to them. Can you let him call them?’ She doesn’t make eye contact with me. She keeps working. She is showing me how diligent she is. This is like a trade for her; even with her ailment, she is working hard. They are all working hard.

‘He has already asked me that himself,’ I say.

‘I know.’

‘So I have to give the same answer.’ She doesn’t look at me. She types. ‘You know what it will cost to let him do that.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘But, Jesus. Come on.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. I drift upwards and turn and kick off, back towards the lab. When I am at my console I take another stim. The image is getting slightly clearer. I’m there watching the pin and the ship as a tiny burst of light, no more than a few pixels wide, comes from the rear of the thing – of the ship – and the ship starts moving again.

‘Tomas,’ I say. ‘Tomas.’ He’s still asleep. That’s the difference between him and me: how far we’re willing to go.

Somehow, I am asleep; and somehow, I have a dream about Inna.

I cannot really see her: only a shimmer of her flesh as I chase her through the corridors. I have skills that I don’t have in real life, the ability to dance through this lack of gravity as if I was born in it. I catch glimpses of Inna’s tattoos as I chase her: the head of that bird, and in my dream, the way it coils around her body, turning into chimera, bird and snake and lion, all drawn around her body. She stops and turns, and the tattoos shift around her, like a story come to life. The lion eats the bird. The bird eats the snake. The snake somehow consumes the lion, slackening and dropping its jaws and taking it all in. This is all I can see: the swirling colours of the animals, so bright and crisp and deadly.

I wake up and I am at the console, and I am drifting slightly upwards, my body slack. It’s scary, this feeling; and my mouth is dry, and my neck throbs and aches. ‘It’s definitely the
Ishiguro
,’ Tomas says over the speakers, and that is what wakes me. I look at a clock: I have been asleep for three hours, as best I can tell. I don’t know how it happened. I must have passed out when the last lot of pills ran their course, and my body did the rest. I had been awake for a long time before that. Hours and hours.

‘I can see it,’ I say, but my voice croaks. I find the stims and the water and I wash one down with the other, and I feel so much better for a second, and then slip into normality. I peer in at the ship. The distinctive hull shape. The fringe of colours that runs the rim. The distinctive stamp of the name on the side, as they used to do with galleons. Curlicued and delicate writing, at odds with the presentation of the rest of the ship. It’s a blur, and still slightly pixelated, like some old video game from a museum: constructed of the individual blocks. ‘That’s confirmation.’

‘It is.’

‘I’ve already told Tobi to change course and head towards it.’

‘She told me.’ She double-checked with him. My word was not enough.

‘Have you told anybody else?’ I ask. He knows what I mean: the UNSA, who will, in turn, tell the press. The funding opportunities for this trip, which were tight before, would be boundless if the world knew what we had found. The world was, once upon a time, united in their grief for the
Ishiguro
. To find it now would have implications.

‘Nobody else knows yet,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t make sense to cause questions to be asked before we even know the answers. You should tell the crew, though,’ he says. This is his gift to me. This is a give: a way for me to get a win, for them to see me as a real leader. This is a farce, the way that we are. He probably wants me to thank him. ‘You should do it soon,’ he says. ‘They’ll be wondering. You should confirm it with them.’ He sounds distant, as if this isn’t where his focus is.

‘Okay,’ I say, and I pull myself to the corridor. They are waiting and watching, because they know that something important is about to happen. When they see me it is permission, and they come and they gasp, and I cling to the wall at the back of the room. Tomas talks them through what I have found, and they coo and speculate out loud, and they ask questions: but he answers them all, even though neither of us has any of the answers.