The Echo (7 page)

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.

‘Of course you do, Brother.’

‘You didn’t. You said you were going to bed, but then you were back again. You didn’t even leave.’

‘I did,’ he says. ‘I slept in the room here. Four hours, that’s all I need.’

‘Every night?’

‘Nowadays, sure. Sometimes it’s less. Sometimes more.’

‘Okay,’ I say. I think about talking to him more, but then it strikes me that he is already gone: that the slight hiss on the connection when he is listening to me is no longer there, and that in this bed I am all alone. So I talk to myself. We used to talk in bed, as children: every night before we went to sleep we would lie there, in the darkness, and we would go through what had happened. I don’t know when or why it began, but it was a habit. An addiction. It was something we always did. Our mother used to say that we jabbered ourselves to sleep. It wasn’t until we were sixteen and we moved into a new house in the city, away from the farm that we grew up on, that we were given separate rooms. I felt the space there, so I carried on talking into the darkness. It was only then that I realized it had always been that way. It wasn’t a conversation. We told each other what had happened, but we were actually talking to ourselves. Without him it was the same. I told myself what had happened, and I told myself what was going to happen on the next day. Look back, then peer forward. As an adult, speaking to myself, I pictured myself as a scientist, in a white coat, standing at the front delivering a lecture or a sermon. Increasingly, I could feel the pull of becoming somebody great. I wonder if he still does it now, with his baker lying next to him: if he mumbles to himself as I do, barely comprehensible but understandable by my own ears.

Here and now, I talk to myself. I tell myself what happened in the day that has just been, and before that, back to the last time I remember sleep as it is here: in a bed, and of my own volition.

I sleep, and there are dreams, but I do not remember them. I suppose that’s better, sometimes: to not have that looseness concerning their reality. When I wake up, I forget where I am for a second, because I could be anywhere but here. I push the lid of the bed and it opens upwards, and I see that they are all crowded around Tobi’s bed: I can see the back of her head, and I can see Inna peering into her eye, shining a light in there. I am selfish. I worry about my own being first, checking myself before asking about her. The white spots in my vision are gone, but my gut still creaks, and my body hurts. I do not know how long I slept for, because there is only a constant darkness outside to judge it from, and there are no clocks visible from here. I unclip myself and push up, turning to look at them. Wallace is here looking at Tobi with Inna, and he nods at me in that way that comfortable men do: dipping his head, no smile on his face. This is my good morning.

‘How is she?’ I ask.

‘I’m fine,’ Tobi says. ‘Freaked out, maybe.’ She nods at Inna, who lifts a screen to Tobi’s face. It mirrors Tobi’s eye back at her. I can see it from here as well: the sclera completely red, the cornea and pupil a muddy brown, floating in the midst of the bloody mess. I can see Tobi struggle to hold it together, her eyelid twitching, but she manages. ‘How did it happen?’ she asks. Her voice sounds dulled and slow, and somehow using a slightly lower register than usual. Perhaps she is still sedated, or the effects are wearing off: I can imagine Inna wanting to ease her into this, in case the shock causes a relapse of whatever her fit before was.

‘It’s nothing to be scared of. Sometimes, bleeds can happen in the eye. They’re as full of veins as the rest of you, and they’re tiny. It was most likely the pressure up here.’ She says that as if there’s a direction. So curious: we call space Up, and yet we’re just as likely to be below where we started at any given time. Up makes it easier to understand, I suppose. ‘It’ll pass. I’ve checked that it’s nothing insidious, and it’s not. It’s just a bloody vein. Like a cut, but it shouldn’t even hurt. Does it hurt?’

‘No,’ Tobi says.

‘And it won’t affect your vision. It’s just a bleed. You’ll be fine, honestly.’

‘Just a bleed,’ Tobi repeats. She pulls on her cheek, pulling it down so that she can see as much of her eye as possible. She looks from left to right, and she blinks, as if that might suddenly fix it. ‘I thought I was dying,’ she says. According to her file she’s survived two plane crashes. Maybe that was different. She rolls the eye around, looking to see if the red ends anywhere. ‘Is it a bad one?’

‘It’s nothing,’ Inna says. ‘I’m more worried about the fitting. You’ve had that before?’

‘When I was younger,’ Tobi says.

‘It wasn’t on your records,’ Inna says.

‘It nearly stopped me getting into the air force. But I was tested. I was cleared.’

‘Must be the pressure up here,’ Inna says. ‘Don’t worry about it. We can keep it under control.’ She smiles at Tobi: this isn’t her fault. ‘I’ll be back,’ she says, and she leaves Tobi magnetically clipped to the bed. Inna pulls herself over to me, smiling, but I can tell that she doesn’t mean the curves at the edge of her mouth.

‘You slept well?’ she asks.

‘Fine,’ I say.

‘Sunspots gone?’

‘Gone,’ I tell her. I blink a few times, to check, but my vision’s clear. Tobi has taken my cross. ‘She’s okay?’

‘Did you know that she was ill when she was a child?’

‘No, Tomas did the medical checks. Wait,’ I say. I call him, but Simpson answers. He asks what’s wrong, and I tell him nothing. I tell him I’ll call back later, as if he is just down the road, as if this is all meaningless. ‘Is she okay? Can she perform her duties?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ Inna says. ‘But I didn’t have it logged. I am meant to know if there’s something could go wrong.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

‘Don’t you know any of the medical conditions on this ship?’ she asks.

‘Tomas did it all,’ I say again. ‘I focused on the technical side. I am more like that, I think.’ She is quiet. She looks into my eyes, examining me, checking that I’m okay. ‘My gut is still churning,’ I say.

‘You’re probably hungry,’ she says. ‘You should eat something. We’ve eaten without you. We thought we should leave you to sleep. We asked Tomas, and he agreed.’ I was cut out of the loop, I think. I was, for a second, useless to them.

‘Did you sleep as well?’ I ask. I don’t want to be the only one who is struggling. I want them all to be crumbling, and I will be the glue.

‘For a few hours,’ she says, but I think that she’s lying. I detach myself and she reaches out her hand. She pulls me to the side, to the bar, as if I need her help. I cling on, and try to stretch out – back pushed forward, feet pointed, arms reaching for the side. I wonder if I look as ungraceful as I feel. ‘You’ll get used to this,’ she says, meaning everything, not just the lack of gravity.

‘I’m no good at it,’ I say.

‘You’re getting there,’ she lies again. I wonder if it’s something she does a lot: professional falsity. Or, maybe, it’s something she does with me, to make me feel better. A happy leader is a successful leader.

‘I am useless. I have never been one of those people with balance.’ This hurts more than I thought it would, because I am tensing all my muscles. I let go of the side-rail and drift out, and I crane my whole body around, trying to turn. If I can turn I can control this better, I think. I see Tobi, still there on her bed. Her eye is as if she’s been shot. Wallace is with her, consoling her. He is making her laugh, or he is laughing and she is watching him, but she is moving on. Rallying herself. I get distracted, and suddenly I’m not near the rail. Inna’s hand grabs me and pulls me back.

‘Easy to get adrift. No walks until you’re steady with this, okay?’

‘Like you could stop me,’ I say.

‘Try me.’ I feel more stirring; my gut, my groin. My entire body, reaching out for something more than I currently have. I look away, towards the cockpit, where Hikaru is either still on duty or back on duty, and Lennox is keeping him company. They are not talking, though: instead they are running the tests. It’s constant, testing. This is the difference between our mission and whatever it was they were doing on the
Ishiguro
.

‘I should see if they’re all right,’ I tell Inna.

‘Want a push over there?’ She is playful with it, but I am too uneasy, still. I have no desire to make a fool of myself any more than I already have.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ll crawl.’ She pulls her hands back and swats them together, as if washing them clean of me, and she pushes off, back towards Tobi. She puts her hand on Tobi’s back to console her, and Tobi looks at her with her one bloody eye, and she pulls a face: resilient and powerful. I cling on for what feels like minutes, and then wonder if I can’t move on.