The Echo

by James Smythe

She asked us how it was going with the project (which is what she called the mission, as if we were still in school). It’s going well, we said. We’re doing our best. That’s all you can ask, she told us. She said, I’m in a lot of pain. So we upped her morphine, just that second, because we wanted to help. She said, You could name something after me, couldn’t you? Of course we could, I told her. Tomas said, We could name a star, but I didn’t want that. You can buy that from the internet, I said. Anybody can be named after a star. We’ll pick something else, I told her, and for a second I was best child, again.

  She said, Give me more morphine. So we did, because she was in pain, and who could bear to see that? We worried about if she would die when we left, when we were in another country entirely, and couldn’t make it back to see her. But it was immaterial. She asked us to up her morphine and we did, and again. She died in the night, that night, and I said to Tomas, Well, we name the ship after her. That’s the thing that will be remembered in the history books. Remembered, preserved in a museum: the story of us and our mother, alive for eternity, having been to the stars and back.

  I tell Hikaru and Inna and Easton that I am going to sleep. I climb into my bed, resisting the urge to stay awake; to find the stims and take them. They are not addictive, but maybe that feeling is, I reason: the feeling of being awake, of having yourself fully there. I undress as much as I feel comfortable, knowing that Inna and Hikaru are there. Especially Inna. I wonder if I have let myself go more: if the thinness in my body makes me even less physically appealing. They say that they’re staying awake to watch over Easton, so I don’t need to worry about it. I shut my eyes, in the darkness of that bed, and I talk to myself. I tell myself all that has happened to me, and I think of Tomas, and I think of Inna. I think that I sleep, but I can feel myself as if I am awake. I wonder if the stims have damaged me. I wonder if it’s possible to ruin the part of you that sleeps, and rests, and recovers.

  When I wake up, they are all asleep. I am alone. I look at Easton, curled up, floating in the middle of the airlock; and then the other beds, their screens all dimmed. I clip myself to a rail and watch them, and I ask for my brother, over the intercom, but there’s no answer. I do not know if this is because he can’t hear me at all, now. There’s nothing when I click through to Earth. I send a message for him, telling him what happened, in case he doesn’t know. Maybe he will want to save me. I beg him to: I say, I cannot be alone up here without you. Have I ever needed him like this before?

  I notice that Inna’s bed is open, and she is watching me. She has seen I don’t know how much of me talking to Tomas, snivelling and crying. She doesn’t judge; instead, she pushes out of her bed and towards me, and she opens her arms wide and envelops me. She is comforting: her skin is warm against mine.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘This is okay, you know.’

  ‘I do not know who I am,’ I say. ‘Without him, I don’t even know what I can be.’ Her hands rub my back, and they find their way to my hair, and I cry onto her vest, soaking her shoulder. The tears peel away, and I notice them, and I think, I have seen that before. Everything has a part to play in my memory of this.

  ‘We only have ourselves,’ Inna says. She moves back, and she raises her shirt, only above her belly, to show me more of the tattoo. She exposes the bottom half of the bird that starts at her shoulder. In its claws it carries a word, as if it were a dead mouse. Pak, it says. It is so dark, but now I can see surgery scars with my thumbs, and the tattoo following them: the lines of the bird, loose and fluid, along the flat, crease-free skin that shows where her body once failed her. I can see all of her written out in the tattoo. She has had the darkness inside her, destroying her organs, just as my mother did. I wonder how much of her has been taken. Life has a way of making this happen. Some would call it fate. ‘We are all we are left with,’ she says. She covers herself again, and she holds me once again. For a brief moment I do not know which of us needs this more; but that moment passes.

  We hear the scream as we’re asleep: standing with each other, magnetized to the rail, in some comforting embrace. When I wake up, it’s to look into her face, and there’s a second before I hear the scream again. We detach and push towards it. She is faster than me, through the doorway first and into the corridor. It is Hikaru’s voice, the scream: wet and pained and like a full-stop. He is on the floor, only a few inches above the ground, his body in the pose of a kneel, of praying, a genuflection; and there is a jagged shard of plastic in his neck, blood thudding out in baubles of thick red, dabbing the walls in dragged-out smears. He pulls the shard out and immediately lets go of it, and it looks as though he is doing it in slow motion. It floats in front of his eyes, taunting him. Inside the airlock, the journalist Cormac Easton: his hands red with Hikaru’s blood. The computer panel outside the door has been activated: somebody was trying to do something with it. I wait at the back, shocked and scared and so ineffectual. Inna rushes to Hikaru’s drifting body and screams at the phantom inside the airlock.

  ‘You monster,’ she says. ‘Why would you do this? What did he ever do to you?’ She’s angry, and it’s a gut reaction: she reaches for the button to lock the airlock, to trap Easton in. I am in the doorway, and I am slow to react. He is faster. Easton is used to this: he is somehow at one with the lack of gravity, a fish thrown back into the water. He shoots forward, his arm out, and he takes the shard, and he kicks off the floor. He lashes out with it again. Not a stab, this time, but a swipe. The tip scratches across her neck. It is a scratch at first, and I am glad that he missed, that he was ineffective; and then her neck opens up, a second mouth lower down, lipless and slowly gaping as she gags. Her blood joins Hikaru’s as her hand hits the panel, the right button by some fluke of chance, to close the airlock and seal it. It hisses shut, driven into Cormac’s frail body, and I hear the cracks of his bones as he is knocked backwards. He is trapped inside, no longer a threat, and I can move now: my faculties back, freed from self-imposed rigidity. I rush to Inna to see what I can do to help. Hikaru is already too far gone. It’s pointless, thinking that I might save him. But Inna: her injury is fresher. I pick her up in my arms, draping her arms over my shoulders, and I try to walk-swim back towards the living area with her. Her blood soaks into my clothes, which is good, because this way it isn’t flooding out, soaking the rest of the ship; and I finally reach the table that we ate from, or sat at while we ate, and I lie her on it. I open the medical supplies cupboard, no real idea what I am doing, and I take gauze and sealant. I know to make injections with the sealant, to stem the flow of blood, and when I have done them I try to stop the blood by pressing the gauze down. He neck feels loose under my hands: as if it is slipping as I press on it. I apply pressure regardless. I remember that being something that I should do.

  She keeps breathing. I can hear it. I can see her chest. I am afraid to leave her, but I need more than this. Inna passes out, but she is still alive. The sealant appears to have worked, and she is still breathing, but I cannot feel a pulse. When she is settled, still weakly breathing, I think that I should check in the other room: to see that Hikaru is dead, and what has happened to Easton. As soon as I leave her and get into the corridor I shake until I have to stay perfectly still, and I feel – I see – myself vomit. It’s a reaction that I can’t control.

  I see Easton inside the airlock. He’s having trouble breathing: his chest is bloody. Ribs puncturing lungs, I’d imagine. He is suffocating, dying, pawing at the floor. He looks at me, and his eyes are so big in his drawn face that they’re almost comical.

  I’m dying, he seems to be saying, though his maw of a mouth. He mouths it: open and close, open and close.

  I’m dying, he says.

  ‘Good,’ I reply.

  PART THREE

  O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.

  – T. S. Eliot

  13

  Inna lasted nearly a day. I never found her pulse again, but she kept breathing for a while. It was too shallow. She didn’t w
ake up. She had no last words, not to me at least. Only what she said to Easton, and I couldn’t even remember that as I held her body.

  I didn’t think about the cycles. About how often I would have to watch that scene play out.

  The loop begins with Hikaru in there as Easton sleeps, attempting to do as I ended up doing: seal the airlock doors and trap him. Maybe he intended to flush him out; I cannot tell. Hikaru moves slowly and quietly. He begins to tap on the keys to close the door, but he’s not the stealthy one here. Easton has been awake the entire time. He launches himself around the corner of the airlock, faster than Hikaru can react – and since then, with the time that I have had to myself, I have contemplated his deterioration and the effect that it has had on his body, and how adept he became in that time at adapting to the weightlessness, turning it to his own advantage – and then he stabs him. I have been able to examine the blade over time: presumably torn from some part of the Ishiguro. What I thought was a single piece is not. It is the construct of hundreds of thin wires, torn and stripped from the interior systems of the ship, I would assume, wound around and around, then carved and smoothed, heated and melted together to form a new single blade. It is the product of some work, of time and effort. It is quite elegant, I suppose.

  He slides the blade into Hikaru’s neck and then scutters backwards through the air, and there’s a look in his eyes: almost as if he’s shocked at himself. Self-preservation, that’s all it was. He knew what Hikaru was planning. I don’t know what happened on the Ishiguro, and I don’t suppose that I ever will, but something made him this way. He is broken and gone, a product of time and circumstance. I feel sorry for him, sometimes. When I try to think of him as a man other than this: away from this situation, from the deaths that he caused; or causes; or will cause. When Inna arrives he seems to panic further. She is another potential threat. She is only trying to help Hikaru but she’s so aggressive in how she speaks to him. He lashes out. He’s trying to keep her back. He’s just unlucky with Inna, I think. There is no malice in his murdering her. I wonder how this has worked for him: if he’s been looping but somehow ageing at the same time. How long has he been alive for? How long has he been out here? And when he dies, if he wakes up and doesn’t understand what has happened, how can he excuse what he has become?

  I can see myself in him, or him in me. Especially now that I’m all alone. The last one left, really; the only one actually alive. I am, however, as much a part of this as they. It begins when I am not in the room: when I am back at my starting place, looking away from the bodies, head bowed; an actor designated a part, a starting position behind a curtain.

  For a few cycles I took Inna from the room and saved her briefly, convinced that I could do something differently. I had everything prepared, so that when I looked away and the play began, I could get her and save her. I have tried every option that I can think of. After a while, when I got tired, I began leaving her there. I would watch it happen on video, because I didn’t want to be there in person. Would she think that I was betraying her? Of course she would. It would be the third time. The cock would crow, and she would never be mine again. So I leave her there. When she’s not aided by me, she dies a lot faster. She bleeds out in minutes, and she tries to save herself, flapping uselessly, coating the room in her blood. It’s hard to tell who dies first: her or Easton.

  Sometimes I find myself staying with them because I can’t stand the thought of it starting again: so I stand in the doorway and watch their bodies after they’ve passed away, and I try to stay there for as long as possible. It’s a battle of wills. How long can I stare at them; how long can I wait while they die.

  It’s been three weeks since they died, and I don’t know how many times I have watched it, but I am not used to it, and I don’t hate their deaths any less than I used to.

  The ship has been quiet. There are no echoes in space. I should know. I talk to myself, because why would I not? I do it simply so that I can hear another voice in the void. Despite his betrayal – and I see it as that, surely and definitively – I miss Tomas fiercely. I try to talk to him, and I send him more messages, telling him what has happened, explaining how alone I now am, and yet I only hear my own voice coming back. Still: at least this voice is something we share.

  Now, I have no trouble sleeping. I shut the door on the bed and in there it is silent, and it is still. When I wake up, I wonder if anything will be different, but I know the answer. Even though there was no audience, the play continued. Every day I use more of my air and get closer to having to move the ship or die. And if I die – if I choke to death, unable to breathe – all that will be guaranteed is that I will have to live that death over again.

  I wonder where I would begin from.

  I have done things to try and help me understand this. I have seen if I can play with the scenario. I cannot stop it: the cycle never begins until I am away from it, and I cannot reach it in time. Chaos theory was wrong: it plays itself out, always exactly the same. We are doomed to repetition. There are never variations. I have tried to tamper with the room before a cycle begins, to see if I can affect it. If I suck all the air out, for example, can I knock them all out before it begins? Drag the key players to other areas? Lock Cormac in before he can do his damage? Open the airlock as soon as the cycle begins, maybe? Nothing sticks. All my work is undone. I cannot explain any of this, and thus I have become neutered: a scientist who understands nothing of his surrounding or situation, who can prove or disprove nothing, who can never attain answers.

  One time, I dragged Inna’s body from there as I did that first occasion, only faster – I am becoming more adept at the path to the table, knowing when to turn my body and hit the walls at their best, even if the collisions leave me with bruises, all to get Inna back within the shortest time possible. I cannot save her, so I try to make it easier on her. I make her comfortable. I find myself wondering what’s wrong with her; pushing aside her top, and then seeing where the scar lines the tattoo, how much of her side is the fake flesh that they used to seal her up. She never had a chance to let me see it in the light. Here, looking at it with as close to scientific eyes as I can muster, I can see that there is art in both. I wonder which came first: the desire for the bird tattoo or the scar? If she saw the line of the scar when she was healed, saw the different tone of the synthetic skin, and through some almost-pareidolic reaction she saw the bird on her chest, deciding there and then to make it somehow more real? I look up the word that the bird carries on the computer, and of course it is Cancer. She was shedding the past, looking to a future. Would that I could.

  We – that is, the ship and her crew, in whatever form we might take – have drifted. I don’t know exactly where we are, or how much the anomaly might have grown – or moved – from our original position. On the maps, we are a way from it, but there’s no real way of tracking what the anomaly is doing. I repeatedly sit at the console in the cockpit and think about pressing buttons and seeing if I can fly this thing: program a new destination. I have never tried to fly this. But I would assume that it couldn’t be that difficult: we designed how it should work, and we watched them build it, watched the trials. We had simulations constructed in the early days to give us an idea of how the yoke would work, the joystick, and how the remote controls would work given the lag and so forth. I took the controls then, once. The heft and power of the real thing can’t be that much different.

  Sometimes I think that there might be an exit on the other side of this thing. That I could travel through it and maybe there I would find a way out.

  I go through cycles myself: where I have to leave them alone to play out as they will; or where I cannot take watching Inna die again, so I attempt to save her, despite knowing the outcome. I think of it as a duty: every few times, I want those final few moments with her. I wait until it’s started, with my back to them and my eyes closed, and then when I hear the action start I put myself in position. As I try to save Inna she seems to know what I am doing.
She appreciates it. I am there with her in her final moments, and I try to give her peace.

  I think about the great discoveries in our lifetime, in the lifetimes of those who came before us, and I wonder what they must have first thought: how inexplicable it was to contemplate a round Earth, to see and understand comets and meteors, to uncover evolution, electricity, the atom bomb. As we took those first tentative steps into space, inventing a means to explore that which had previously been something close to hearsay. I used to wonder how it must have felt, as somebody who had seen two wars at the start of that century, to watch that launch on the television at the time: to see where we had reached. To have watched Le Voyage dans la lune as a child, and then to see it realized. No face in the moon; no mermaids or aliens. Instead, only footsteps and flags and dust. Just as incredible, when you think of it. And now, if I return, they will know of this: that I discovered something truly inexplicable. Here is a space that makes no sense; space in the truest sense of the word. Not the void that we describe with that word in our regular lives, but something else. When the Ishiguro didn’t come home, hypothesis was everything. Now, I could tell them so much more.

  Tomas still can. Even without me he has enough. I wonder if he’s told the world that I am lost yet? I wonder if he’s told them that I am dead? I tell Inna, on those times that I save her, that we will make it home. I know that, for her, it is a lie. But in those moments either she believes it, or it makes her feel better, and then she dies with more of a smile on her face. She still trusts me, even after everything.

  I have lost track of how long this has taken; how long I have been here, doing this for.

  It is one of the times in which I save her. I pick her body up and let the blood soak me again, into my suit which has been soaked so many times. The blood stays on me: I am out of this cycle, and my suit is darkened with Inna’s life. Each time it happens there is something so warm about it. It’s almost comforting, to feel her so alive for just a few seconds. This is Inna, and I am doing right by her. If I can get better at saving her, with practice and hard work, she might one day have more time with me. I am not trying to save her life now. I know that she is beyond that. I would need to be a surgeon to attempt more than I currently do, and while I have contemplated it, a part of me is unwilling to punish her in her dying moments with experimentations and attempts. I have done it before, when she was outside, but there was a distance there. I think, now, about the direct pain she would feel; and how I would feel her dying breath on my face as I tried. It would hurt her. But to preserve her, to ease her suffering, that is something I can do. I am injecting her with the sedatives when she leans to me and speaks to me, the first time that she has done this in any of her cycles.