The Echo (30 page)

‘Yes,’ I say, but I’m not sure that it isn’t a lie. I call to him, but there’s no answer. In the darkness, with the bed shut, I say his name over and over. ‘Where are you?’ I ask.

There is no answer, and I wonder if it was just a ghost. If I was never meant to hear it in the first place.

I wake up and I say his name, first thing, in case. But there is no answer, not even the hiss of a connection. I wonder if I imagined it, last night. If I dreamed what it was that I wanted to happen. It is possible. I have never had an imagination, not really, but maybe this time. Maybe now is when I develop one. I get out of bed and discover that I am weightless again, so we must be going as fast as we can, now coasting; and I move to the cockpit and bring up the map, because I want to see where the computer thinks that we are. We have no way of knowing the centre of this thing, but if it is close to a sphere in shape, maybe we can guess. I start the program doing its work, and I lean back and shut my eyes, and then there comes a crackle from the speakers.

‘Brother?’

‘Yes!’ I say. ‘You’re there!’

‘I can’t hear you,’ he says. ‘I can only hear static.’ His voice fades in and out of the nothingness. I try and talk with him more, but there’s nothing coming back to me. It’s quiet again. It was definitely clearer than the night before, which makes me wonder if the anomaly is thinner than we thought. Maybe I’ll be reaching the far side of it soon enough? Maybe that’s where the signal is coming from. There’s no anomaly wall, nothing to stop me leaving it. The other side of the membrane, an easy slip-through for me, and back to the real world. This is the first time that I have felt hope in a while, I think. ‘Hello?’ I ask.

‘I’m here,’ his voice says, and then it’s gone again, fading into the crackle. I don’t stop the ship, or turn around: I know that I have to keep going forward. Maybe I am heading towards an exit; maybe that is how I can hear him.

There is nothing left for it now.

I talk to him, to fill the silence. I think that I could go insane here alone if I was given half a chance, so I keep talking to him. His voice flits in and out of the conversation; occasional bursts of dialogue with me that amount to answers, monosyllabic or thereabouts, but still: this is a conversation. The relief I feel at that. I am just so glad that I am not alone any more.

In the morning, the first thing I do is to look at the computer’s calculations. It has finished extrapolating where the middle of this could be, and it is so far away still. Past that, the other end of the anomaly. What might be an exit. There is no concept of being able to tell what is around me, and no way to tell if the ship’s instruments are correct. No points of reference for anything. In the olden days, a ship could plot a course by the stars, because they were unchangeable, the constancy. I am here with nothing around me, nothing at all. The distance looks as if it could be feet away, maybe, or thousands of miles. There’s no horizon. The map could be so wrong and I would never even know it.

I want to say, I am coming back to you. I want to say, I knew that you would not abandon me.

The ship is slowing down. I find it hard to tell, but it is slowing. I set the computer to track it and it does, and I do the math myself, seeing the numbers as they should be and then as they actually are. We are – I am – slowing inside here. There is drag inside the anomaly.

This should be a breakthrough. It should be a wonder: that this thing that doesn’t exist in any real way that we can tell, this anomaly in the truest sense of the word, it has a form of some kind. It is real, and must be tangible. I celebrate, by myself, that there is evidence. There must be something I can collect to prove this; maybe I just don’t have the tools yet. But still, there is work to be done.

Then I am alone, just me and my discovery. I try to tell Tomas but the line is dead, and I think about what it means as the ship slows and slows, and I realize that I will have to switch on the engines constantly, to keep us moving forward. That I will be burning fuel all the way to the edge of the anomaly. I have no choice: eventually I will run out, and the batteries will discharge over time, and then I will die.

Where will I begin from? Here? This moment of realization? I try to call Tomas again, over and over and over, and then I set the engines to burn to counteract the drag: only a small amount, to keep us coasting, top up the speed and make it seem like there’s nothing slowing us down.

Me. Nothing slowing me down. That is the easiest thing to forget, through all of this.

We would always be in touch. From the tin-can telephones we made in the garden as children – running from his bedroom upstairs to the tree house, where I would sit and attempt to communicate with him – to the telephone call he made to me the night after he met his baker. She was asleep in the bedroom that they would eventually end up sharing, and he crept to the kitchen and opened the fridge, so as to have an excuse, and he called me. He whispered.

‘She’s nice,’ he said.

‘Good,’ I told him. I was alone in my room, and I had been asleep. Or I told him that I had, I cannot remember which, accurately. ‘You can tell me about her tomorrow.’

‘I want you to meet her tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You can come with me, and we’ll have lunch.’

‘It seems very early,’ I said. ‘How do you know you won’t have forgotten about her in a week?’

‘And it would matter if I had?’ He sounded affronted. ‘I like her. You could make the effort.’ This was so soon after our mother died, and he was over-compensating. He had found a woman who made the kitchen smell like a stereotype should, and who wanted to take care of him. Who appreciated how hard he worked. ‘She wants to meet you.’

‘I’m surprised you even mentioned me.’

‘Of course I did. I told her all about what we’re working on, and how important you are.’

‘You broke the NDAs?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, they don’t count with her. She’s a baker, Mira, not a spy. She doesn’t care. She thinks it’s amazing, you know, what we’re working on.’

‘You’ve jeopardized everything,’ I said, ‘for this woman you barely know?’

‘Oh, goodnight, Brother,’ he said. He hung up the phone and ended the conversation, a conversation that was mine to end. I think that’s when it fell apart for us, because that’s when we stopped talking, apart from when we were at work. He said to me once, a few months after that, that my jealousy was ruining our relationship. That we were brothers and surely that was more important than whatever animosity I felt towards the woman that he loved.

I tell him what has happened anyway, and I tell it to him every few hours in case he hears me. I send it out there to let him know what to expect, and how to prepare. When I finally get something back from him he sounds so exhausted and resigned. I say, ‘I’m so pleased to hear from you.’

‘I know,’ he replies, but he sounds as if he doesn’t feel the same. He is tired and sad, I think, as if he knows something that I do not. It’s the static, I tell myself: it warps everything. To him, I wonder how I sound. If I sound as eager as I fear, as happy to speak to him as I expect I do.

‘Are you far away?’ I ask when I get the chance.

‘Not far,’ he says.

‘You’re here for me?’

‘Yes,’ he says, and then his voice is swallowed again. I spend the night surrounded by the screens as large as I can make them, in that blackness, and when it doesn’t feel real enough I go to the airlock and open the external door. I press my face to the plastic window of the internal one and I watch through, no sign that we’re even moving at all. I stay there for I don’t know how long, but it’s not out of pity: more a feeling that, despite how terrible it is out there, how I cannot understand what it is, we – that is, Tomas and I, working together as we should be – have beaten it.

I don’t hear from him the next day. He is silent, even though I get static, and I wonder why. It makes me worry that whatever plan he had has fallen through, and that I’m now alone again.

It doesn’t change how I spend my day. I spend it worrying: about fuel, air, Tomas. I can barely eat for the worry, so I try one of Hikaru’s white bars, one of the noodle bars. It’s so bland that I keep it down easily, and then I feel guilty. I think that this cycle is better than the one he died doing.

Tomas speaks to me the next morning, and there’s a clarity to his voice, to the transmission. He says, ‘This will all work out, you know.’ He is trying to make me feel better, and to bolster my spirits. He is my brother.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘You sound closer.’

‘I am.’

‘And I am,’ I say. It’s nice. I smile, and I’m sure that he will be doing the same. It’s something synchronous; we always liked it when that happened. People would ask us if it didn’t annoy us, as twins, that we were lumped together. We would say that it made us feel better: that there were always the two of us in a situation, and we were so close that we knew we would never feel alone in our reactions. We always thought the same, until Mother died, until the baker, until this project pushed us apart. I say, ‘I’m glad that you didn’t forget about me.’

‘How could I?’ he says.

‘I thought that you were abandoning me before.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t do that.’ He still sounds so sad. I wonder if he has had just as much trouble getting to me as we had getting here in the first place.

‘Do you swear? That you won’t abandon me in here?’

‘I swear,’ he says.

‘How long until I see you?’ I ask.

‘Another twelve days, by my calculations,’ he says.

‘Twelve days? That’s all the fuel I have!’

‘It’s going to be close,’ he says. ‘Very close.’

‘And you’re heading towards me as well?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I can’t. It’s just you, Mira. It’s all on you.’ And then he’s gone, and I am alone again. Twelve days. I can do this. I have gone longer, I tell myself, when it was self-imposed.

‘Do you ever think back to when we were children?’ I ask him. I have always assumed that he never did: that he was too preoccupied with moving forward. Constantly moving forward, never dwelling on what happened before. ‘I think about it,’ I say, ‘because I wonder what made us who we were. What made us different.’

‘I think about it,’ he says. There’s such a fuzz on his voice, but so unmistakably him. ‘I think about it all the time.’

‘Because it mattered to you? I thought that we had a good childhood.’

‘We did.’

‘So what happened?’ I ask. The static is too strong, I think, because he doesn’t answer. So I lie there and try to sleep, and to forget about the gnawing inside me. Suddenly I find it difficult again. There is pressure on me now; and maybe I will miss something, something important. Maybe he will tell me something, and I will not hear it.

I don’t know if Tomas’ plan to rescue me involves me alone, or me and the ship. I tell myself that it would be nice to take this all back, considering who it is named after. It’s fine to have a backup, but it will have a different name. He will have named it something pompous and inglorious, I should imagine. A seemingly well-chosen word like
Bravery
or
Temerity
. Something that sounds like a ship’s name but that he feels represents a facet of himself and the trip we have made. Or that he will have made.
Discovery
, maybe. Maybe that’s too impressive. He’ll want some level of boastful subtlety. There is a part of me that wonders if the rescue he is conducting was part of this: that it’s a glory he will attain for himself, that I will have no part of. I wonder if he knew what would happen with the anomaly, and didn’t tell me. I suppose that it’s something I will always have to wonder.

I clean everything top to bottom again. I want the ship to be in pristine condition when he sees it: to show that, while I could not save the crew, I have saved this. The investment; our creation. I clean out the beds that my crewmates’ bodies were put into. I change into one of the spacesuits, because then I can shut myself in their beds and breathe through the oxygen tanks, and I don’t need to worry about taking in their death. Besides which, the suits are comfortable. I can wear this through, and when he sees me, I will look as though I belong out here. I am a professional.

I eat when I like. I try and talk to Tomas: this is a constant process, where I call for him and try to get him to answer. He crackles in, and he makes excuses, which is typical.

‘It’s hard to get a connection,’ he says.

‘Did you have to adapt the radios to the anomaly?’

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘How did you do it?’ I ask. I feel like I’m constantly suspicious.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘They just told me that they got it working.’ He’s lying. There’s nothing that he won’t understand when his staff explain it to him. And, for that matter, that he won’t have asked about. They will have said it was working; he will have wanted to know how. He’s an inquisitive mind.

‘What’s keeping you so busy?’ I ask.

‘Research,’ he says. He sounds exhausted, as if he’s not sleeping. If he’s anything like me, he isn’t, not at this stage of his trip. And he is exactly like me.

Eleven days. He is more talkative today, and I ask him how he is. He says, ‘I’m fine. I’m tired.’ He doesn’t ask how I am, but I tell him.

‘You don’t know what it’s been like,’ I say. ‘Out here, all alone. And how they all died.’

‘I know,’ he says.

‘No you don’t. You haven’t even asked about Inna and Hikaru. You haven’t asked me anything about what happened.’

‘Oh,’ he says.

‘Don’t you want to talk about it? Don’t you think we should?’

‘No,’ he says, then, ‘I’ve seen some parts, from the camera footage. I assumed you wouldn’t want to go into it.’

‘I have had nobody to talk to.’ I think about how weak this connection between us is: how much data could they have really streamed? ‘Where are you?’

‘The far side of the anomaly,’ he says.

‘Why is the connection so bad?’

‘You can’t expect it to be perfect,’ he tells me. ‘Not where we are, in this situation.’ He crackles. I feel like I am in some ancient comedy movie, and the man on the phone is faking driving into a tunnel. I don’t trust Tomas. I say it aloud – ‘I don’t trust you,’ I say – but I don’t know if he’s listening, because all I get from his end is the static.