The Echo (21 page)

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Do you want me to open them?’

‘Work left to right,’ I say. ‘Open them one by one, and set them going.’ She concentrates on the buttons. She presses them as if she has never worked one before, but I know that’s just nerves.

‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘Take your time.’ She seems her age, here and now. As if this has revealed it all to her: everything that she has done and been, all of it, suddenly rushing back into her face. Undoing whatever care she’s taken of herself, or work that she’s had done. She looks scared and old and tired.

‘They’re running,’ she says. ‘What do I do now?’

‘This is the easy part,’ I say. Now you just hold the device out. You point it all around you, turning it every minute or so. Turn it just a fraction of a degree. We need readings of this whole anomaly, to help us understand it. It will find a hole in the anomaly that we can use.’

‘You couldn’t come over here and do this yourself?’ she asks then, out of the blue. She holds the tablet out, though, and then she moves it slightly. More than I would like for the desired results – I want exact angles, ideally – but I cannot labour the point now. I am picturing the signal blaring out in every direction, waiting for a response. I am picturing her handing me the device when she is done, giving me the results, and then us leaving. I do not answer her question, and I take too long, and she realizes that there’s no way out of there. I wouldn’t risk it; she is being used.

‘Look,’ I say, but she doesn’t care. She knows.

‘What was the plan? Were you ever going to tell me the truth?’ Her mouth is pinched. Her cheeks are red. ‘Or were you going to string me along until the very end? Would we just play that I was going to be saved at the end of this?’

‘It isn’t like that,’ I say. ‘This is important.’ I do not think she will understand that. ‘It could help us rescue you,’ I say, ‘but we do not know until we try.’

‘Oh, good. If there’s a chance,’ she spits. ‘What is this? How does this help me?’ She holds the tablet down, losing one of the results. She knows that there’s far more wrong here than she first thought. I want to reach for the device, in case she breaks it or throws it. I think of Tomas, and how those results are a ticket home.

Am I this selfish? Am I really this man?

‘Please hand the device back,’ I say. And she does. She cannot see me, but she looks forward and into my eyes. She is crying. Not hysterical, not begging. Just so desperately sad.

‘What has happened to me?’ she asks.

‘It’s the anomaly,’ I say. ‘It won’t let you die. You were out here days and days ago, and you ran out of air, and you died, but then you came back. You keep coming back, and we don’t know how to stop it yet.’ She nods – I see her helmet bob with an almost tidal smoothness – and then reaches behind her, and I see her hand find the nozzle for the air and unscrew it. ‘Don’t!’ I shout, but even then I wonder why I’m begging her not to, because it’s inevitable. I could reach over there and stop it – my hand on hers, to stay it before she does this to herself – but I have no idea if I could bring it back or not, or if I would be stuck, destined to die slightly after her, destined to come back again back to life just like her, in this perpetual loop.

So instead I am forced to sit here and watch her dying from behind, and it isn’t until I turn and start back towards the ship that she wakes up, desperate, having learned nothing. I get back onto the ship and shut the door behind me.

I plug the device back into the computer and start uploading the information. I need to analyse it. There’s nothing there, though. Nothing of any use to us and our research. I take another stim, dry swallowing it. I am a master of it now.

‘Successful trip?’ Tomas asks.

‘No,’ I say. I leave it at that, for the time being. I don’t tell him the rest, but he might have been listening, for all I know.

Hikaru asks me if I mind him going to sleep. He looks ill. His cheeks sallow; his hair greasy. His eyes are so tired. I tell him that he should rest.

‘We’re heading home soon,’ I say to him. ‘And you’re our only pilot. You’ll need your sleep.’ He nods. He doesn’t believe me. This is what he’s doing: he’s accepting his fate. Has he made peace with it? Is it possible to make peace with something that might not happen? ‘Goodnight,’ I say to him, and he lies down in his bed and fastens the magnets. He is lying in between Tobi and Wallace, but he doesn’t seem to notice that, or care. He shuts the door behind him, and the glass goes dark.

Then the ship is quiet. Inna is out there alone, but I try to pretend that she isn’t. I wonder if I shouldn’t sleep as well. I can feel my eyelids shake and tremble in the way that they do when the pills wear off, but I do not know how to sleep. I think that I have probably forgotten. That was the problem all along. I inject the sedatives. I feel it on the third, the fourth. There is nothing to miss, now. I lie down at the end of the horseshoe of beds; and next to me is Inna’s empty bed. I shut the lid as well, because maybe then I can pretend.

Even though I am sure that I am asleep, I can hear a noise that I did not make, that reverberates around the ship, coming through it all. It wakes me, but it’s so dark and I do not open my eyes, and then I cannot hear it again. It’s as if it was never there. Then, when I am sure that I am nearly asleep again, I hear it in the distance. It is, I think, similar to the noise of somebody banging on a door.

‘Tomas?’ I hear myself ask, mostly asleep.

There is no answer from him, and I drift. I dream of darkness, and of home.

‘Wake up,’ Tomas says, ‘and be careful. Seriously, Brother. You need to be careful now.’ He opens my bed for me, and I unclip myself. I’m startled and worried, and in that moment between awake and asleep, when everything feels half-lost. I am here but not. I clutch on.

‘What’s happened?’ I ask.

‘You need to bring up a screen of the exterior,’ he says. ‘Do it from there. Stay where you are.’ So I do. I raise the screen, and I flick through the cameras, and look at where we were focused before, but Inna isn’t there. I wonder if this has closed: if she is done. Then I flick to the next camera and she is outside the ship: pressed to the side, clinging to the metal. She looks weak; her hand feebly tapping the exterior airlock door.

‘How?’ I ask. ‘She’s free?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘She’s moved.’ On the screen she splays her fingers and starts slapping the metal. ‘Or the anomaly has moved. But she is still dying. She has died once, out there.’

‘You didn’t wake me?’

‘I tried,’ he says, but he’s lying. As if I do not know the tells in his voice.

‘Am I inside it?’ I ask. He leaves the pause too long. He is fucking with me.

‘No,’ he finally says. ‘We’re guessing, based on the pings. Still sending them out to the sides, assuming that the aperture of the anomaly hasn’t changed.’ Everything is speculation, and I feel my guts rise. I am scared, because that is not what I want. I want to be alive. I want to do what I can. There is no guarantee that, inside there, I will not be able to get out, but we have to work within the confines of what we know. What I know is that Inna is stuck. What I know is that, for some reason, the
Ishiguro
never left, not until the day it exploded. The anomaly is hell. It is death.

‘Does Inna remember anything more?’ I ask.

‘No. She’s more confused, certainly.’

‘You haven’t let her in yet.’

‘Would you have?’ He’s right. I would have made the same decision. I wouldn’t have wanted to risk the ship. She is now a variable: she might be the thing that stops us pulling the ship out of the anomaly, were she inside. ‘You’ll have to talk to her,’ he says, ‘or not. It’s your decision, Brother.’ I flick the camera to show the inside of her helmet. She is desperate. We’re here, next to her, and she has woken up alone and in the dark and we could just open the door but we have not. She will be wondering why; if we are all dead, maybe. Nearly, I want to tell her. We’re getting there. ‘She’s at the end of a cycle,’ Tomas says. The variable is nearly dead. Soon she will begin again, and this will be fresh to her. I click her face away. I do not want to see her die here. I think it might be different: even more confused, even more desperate.

‘Where can’t I go?’ I ask, and he tells me to bring up the screen he’s sending, so I do. I look at the line of the anomaly: carved through our ship. It slices through the engines and pretty much splits the ship into two: down the central corridor, with the airlock and bathroom on one side, the lab on the other; and the beds and lounge and cockpit also divided. The line is nearly straight – the curve of the anomaly so long we barely notice it in here – but we aren’t. We were on a slight angle, so the line matches that. I have more of the lounge and cockpit than the anomaly does. Inna is not the only variable; Hikaru’s bed is firmly inside the anomaly, now.

‘Hikaru is still asleep?’

‘Until we know what to do,’ Tomas says. ‘We don’t want him to panic about this.’ How much has he been watching us? When did this happen, sneaking up on us? ‘Unless you think we should wake him.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Not yet.’ I look at the picture. ‘We need to reverse,’ I say.

‘So we have to wake him.’

‘You can do it from there, can’t you?’

He takes longer than usual to answer. The lag hides a multitude of sins. ‘It’s safer if he does it. From here, what if, I don’t know, what if it crushes him while he’s in his bed? What if that’s how it works? He should do it. You’ll have to wake him up.’ I think he is gone, and then he speaks again. ‘It will sound better, coming from you. Less alarming.’ I try not to think about Inna, still out there. I ask myself, deep inside, if I am a bad person. And if I am, does it matter?

The ship looks as it should from the inside. The anomaly has no colour, no smell. The air is the same: no change in temperature as you approach it, no front that suggests anything different than what we are used to. I contemplate chalk or pen: something to draw a physical line down the ship. I do not want to be caught in this. Accidents can happen. They can be so unbearably fatal, or eternal. The same. On my side of the anomaly: my bed, Inna’s bed, Wallace’s bed, even though it’s full. I have the kitchenette, and the food. In the lounge, they have most of the table, the medical cupboard, a chunk of the floor space, one of the three computers. In the cockpit, they only have half a seat. With Hikaru’s bed still sealed I can’t even hear him sleeping. I cannot reach over and open it, so I tell Tomas to do it.

‘I can’t get a signal,’ he says. ‘I’m pressing it, but it’s not responding.’ I think about the slight static on the connections from inside the anomaly; and I think about the remote probe suddenly becoming unresponsive as it got deeper into it. Three items of electronic interference: almost enough evidence to be definitive. I bring up a screen and try, but again, the bed doesn’t open. ‘You don’t want to reach over there and open it manually?’ he asks. He is joking, but he doesn’t laugh. I clip myself by my belt to the rail and watch the bed.

‘We’ll have to wait for him to wake up of his own accord,’ I say.

‘I suppose so,’ he says. I wait there in silence, staring at the room, trying to work out if the anomaly is going to move – or grow – any more, and if it might swallow me whole. I’m thinking about that when I hear the banging start again, which means that Inna died, and she’s back again, full of air and energy and desperation, banging on the door, begging to be let in. What was that story from when I was a kid, something about a Monkey’s Paw? I haven’t wished that she was still alive yet, but that banging is so insistent. Desperate, as it should be. ‘Tell me about what’s going on down there,’ I say to Tomas. I stare at the beds and wait to see if he will answer.

I think about anything else, after a while. I stare at the beds and wait, and Inna’s banging is a drum inside my head. A constant, unending rhythmic reminder. In my pocket I have a pack of stims, and I take one as soon as I catch myself yawning, because I am still somehow tired. The body needs to recover. You can put it through the ringer, torture and punish it, and then you have to let it recover.

I think about how I can come back from this. How I can ever hope to recover who I was; and I wonder, briefly, who that person even was to begin with.

Hikaru’s bed hisses open. I have been listening to Inna’s hand become weaker, and the sound drop off inside here. The hiss comes as she falls silent, which means that this life is ending for her. Another will start. This is the new cycle. Hikaru lets himself up. He stretches. He cracks his shoulders, rolling them, rubbing them with one palm. He turns his head to look around.

‘What the hell?’ he asks. ‘What’s happened? Why are you so dark?’ He sees me: through the ink of the anomaly. I bring up a screen of one of the cameras, to see what he sees: myself, through a black fog, almost, the internal lights dimmed. I make them bright, but still it is hard to see every detail through this. He brings up a window, and looks out, and he sees the darkness; how there’s no fringe of stars on his side: just the blackness of the anomaly.

‘I’m inside it,’ he says. He rubs his face. He has most of a beard on it now, and his skin is greyer than it was. ‘And I suppose you are not, somehow.’ I don’t know how to deal with this. Likely that this has to be a plaster, rapidly torn off: a wound exposed to the air, for the benefit of healing.

‘The anomaly moved.’

He nods. He’s either not taking this in or he implicitly understands. Maybe I don’t need to go through this all. He unclips himself and swings his legs out, as if there’s gravity and he’s just going to put them on the floor, but then he starts drifting. He pushes towards me with his hands out, and I watch them fold up against the dividing line in mid air: like the world’s best mime. His eyes sag even more as he feels the wall. How it’s inside the ship, how it has cut a swathe through everything: questions that I cannot answer. I wonder if we’ll ever have answers, or if I will return home to accusations. How all that mattered would be the deaths and the enigmas, spoken of as fraud and lies as we attempt to bluffingly explain the unexplainable thing that we have encountered out here.