The Echo taq-2

by James Smythe

  We watch him, her, it, whatever, dance around the outside of the ship. It’s brief. I record it, and then we watch it again: somebody is outside the ship, still alive, and then they get back into the ship and the engines start, and they move off.

  We don’t talk, any of us. We don’t know what this means. We are travelling as fast as we can.

  ‘It has to be Dr Singer,’ Tomas tells me later that day. We’re both sitting in our respective labs as everybody else readies themselves for the evening: whether that means home and families for those around him; bleached-white protein bars and idle speculation for mine. He’s drinking, I can tell. There’s a slur in his voice, a slur that I absolutely recognize. I do not drink, not really, because I cannot stand the lack of control. I cannot stand feeling that loose. I think that that is why Tomas likes it. He will be there, drink in hand, fashioned from the ingredients that he keeps in his desk, the different bottles. He has those little plastic sticks to mix the drinks. Maybe he is even smoking a cigarette. A period costume for performing this very particular type of science. ‘He’s the only one who would even think of heading outside by himself, I suspect.’

  ‘Why aren’t they still sending results?’

  ‘It must be the anomaly,’ he says, as if that’s enough to excuse and explain anything that doesn’t make sense. We haven’t asked each other how Dr Singer would have survived this long; what he must have done to have found food, to have eked out an existence out here. It seems almost gauche. Soon he can tell us those things himself. ‘I’m going home,’ Tomas tells me. He pauses, then: ‘Good work today, Mira.’ Patting me on the head.

  ‘Go back to your baker,’ I say. I try to make it sound light-hearted. He laughs, so I think it worked.

  ‘Goodnight, Baby Brother,’ he says. I hear the click of his severing the connection. I feel uneasy: we never say goodnight. We never say goodbye.

  I pull the image back from the Ishiguro, spin it, examine other parts of the anomaly. Not that we have forgotten it, but we have been preoccupied. The pings are still drawing the outline, and there is a shape forming: here, with the orange trace lines, it is almost the fruit of the same name, this shape, nearly round. Not perfect edges. They will be discovered, as the pings keep being sent and the results keep being recorded. There is nothing as black as the anomaly. No stars; no planets in the long distance, even though they should be there, but they’re hidden behind the sheet of blackness; nothing apart from the Ishiguro, now, and lumps of rock in other quadrants, floating as if they’re caught in a tide. I pull the camera to the edges of the anomaly, where it looks like the aurora borealis, folds and lines of colour along the rim. I trace the line of the thing as best I can: I overlay the pings, and I stare at it. ‘What are you?’ I ask it. I watch it for hours more. When I start to falter, during the night, I take another stim. The next thing I know, I’ve been looking at it all night; and then Inna is behind me, hand on my shoulder, asking me how much sleep I had, but I do not answer. She says that they’re all going to eat breakfast together. She wants me to be a part of this.

  ‘Come on,’ she says.

  Soon the Ishiguro is bigger still: a whole hand with fingers splayed. By the start of the next day it’s like a remote-control toy spaceship, floating across the room. It stops and we marvel at it. Even with the anomaly, this is the most impressive thing here: we’re not strangers, and we’re not even alone out here any more.

  Tomas concentrates on the anomaly. We spoke about it and agreed: he would do the research on the thing that doesn’t change, that is immutable, and I would deal with the ship. With the lag, he is now thirty seconds behind, and he cannot see the picture as well as we can. Besides which, I am happy with that arrangement. The Ishiguro being here is unexplainable, and it might be inspiring, or important. The anomaly is almost a trick of the light that can barely be described as existing, if our readings are correct; the Ishiguro is solid, real, tangible, a picture of human triumph and failure both. It is a capsule of us as a people. When the Indian launch failed, when the ship collapsed out of orbit, the world knew that it was human failure. The crew’s deaths were caused by their own desire to get into space, a rush and a push to prove themselves. When the Ishiguro went missing, however, it was something else entirely. It was man losing to nature: science failing. But I can prove something else, something different. I can give it an ending where science wins: because here is the ship, decades later, still working, still going. Inside it, a man who will surely have discovered something; because, otherwise, why would he still be here? Why would he not have come home?

  It stops more frequently as we get closer. Once a day, maybe. I wonder why, and I picture Dr Singer – Gerhardt, Guy, the great discoverer who almost never was, lost to everything and space and nothing – taking his readings still. A scientist to the very end. What has he found? To have stayed out here this long, riding in the darkness occupied by this anomaly, it must be something truly incredible. The energy used to stop and start, with their utterly fallible, near-broken systems. He found the anomaly in the first instance, so many years ago, back when it was only a speck of nothing in the distance, a vague blur, thought to be something else entirely; and that glory can be his. (If, indeed, it is a glory. We scientists are notable for finding fascination in things that the layman may find tedious. The public, they can relish his return, the conquering hero; we in the science community can relish the results, the numbers, the facts that he will bring with him.)

  I have no imagination, I have always been told. I have always struggled to picture that which doesn’t exist: instead, bloody-minded focus, a stubborn singularity in my mind. But this mission, it has done something to me: I am imagining, I think. I think of my dream of Inna, when I never dream like that; and how maybe it was somehow a catalyst. And Dr Singer now, dreaming of what he might be: it isn’t real, not yet, but I desperately want it to be so.

  I call up the files on the Ishiguro’s crew on the computer and read about them, information I obsessed over as a younger man, when the trip was announced: jealous, desperate to be involved. I postulate their ages now. Older men and women, and they won’t have the medicines that we do, and none of them will have had the surgery afforded to the elderly back home. They will have suffered bone loss. They will find it hard to adjust to life back on Earth. I do not know how many of them might be alive, or how many dead. I do not know how they have survived. But it is that ship. Out of this we will garner unassailable facts, and we will know things that we did not know before.

  ‘The Ishiguro’s inside the anomaly,’ I say to Tomas. ‘I wonder what is inside there. What Dr Singer has found.’ Tomas only slightly listens. He is working, as I am. This is how it was always meant to be, and we are almost back to back, if not separated by such a distance.

  7

  Deceleration is a process that can hurt. It’s not as violent as when we left the NISS, but it’s close. Parts of the ship’s systems have been slowing us slightly ever since we reached peak velocity, so that it wouldn’t be as extreme; but it’s still violent, and we still have to be in the beds, still have to be asleep. Tobi gives us a warning when we are an hour out from the anomaly, from the Ishiguro. She tells us that we have to lie down and seal the beds, so we prepare. I tell Inna that I will do my own injection, and I take three of the sedatives and pop them into the hypo and then fire them into my neck. I need to counteract anything that might remain from my last stim. As I get into my bed I can already feel that it will not be like the last time. I talk to myself as I go to sleep; or maybe I am talking to Tomas. I do not know if he talks back.

  We wake up, all of us, at the same time. We cannot be left to sleep: there is too much to be done on the ship, in the here and now. He could control this from the Earth, of course, and then when we wake tell us that we have missed it, that the mystery is gone and the puzzle solved and the mission over, turn around and head for home: but he knows that he needs us. This is why we are still manned and crewed. There was a logic a few decad
es ago that we could do space travel with robots, with a man controlling them from a shuttle or a base somewhere. This is how, the theory went, we can conquer Mars. They were wrong, of course, because everything will go wrong. And we have still not conquered Mars. In reality, we have decided to abandon that plan for now. For now, there are more interesting concerns than a cold, dead planet we do not need to conquer yet.

  So now we wake, and we rub our eyes, and we detach ourselves. I feel dismal. I feel as though I could stay there, but the bleating from the alarm that Tomas has employed is too loud, and I know that there is work to do. I fumble from my bed and to the medicine cupboard, and I take a stim. I am not the only one: behind me, Wallace asks if he can have one as well. I nod and pass it to him, but I miss, and the pill hangs there between us for a second, drifting. I look at him. His face is different. It is grey. He hasn’t taken to being up here, I don’t think. We said, at the start, that this is not for everybody. In a capsule, out here, you are so isolated. They used to worry about submarine crews in the last century. What might happen in one of them if the person lost control of their faculties. Wallace takes the pill and swallows it, and he looks at me, but not eye contact: instead staring at my cheeks, just underneath my eyes.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I reply. I have to say something, I feel. The others are ready before us, rushing to positions. Tomas speaks to them, but I can’t even hear what he is saying: as my own pill kicks in, and the sleep rushes away, and for a second I am not even where I am.

  ‘We’ve got it on the screen, right in front of us,’ Tobi says, and that’s enough to bring me back. That is all.

  Even though we have screens throughout the ship; even though it’s the same video feed as you would see anywhere else; even though we had seen it like this from a distance before we even went to sleep: we all crowd into the cockpit as we approach the anomaly, and the Ishiguro. The anomaly has become a second part in this, the thing that will be dealt with after the excitement of the immediacy of the other ship. The anomaly isn’t going anywhere. Yet this is the only other ship in the entire solar system, the only other travellers that we’ll see this entire journey, and they have been missing for decades. The things that they will have seen. Hikaru is piloting. Tobi sits next to him, eye patch covering her bad eye (‘I figure I can make first contact,’ she jokes, ‘pretend I’m a pirate and try and to get them to bug the hell out.’); Wallace behind Hikaru, though I would swear, looking at him, that he isn’t watching this, that his mind is somewhere else; Lennox floating a few feet back, lodged near the ceiling to get a view; and then myself and Inna, at the edge of the scene, our sides touching. She is close to me; she puts her hand on my arm to hold me steady, then pinches the fabric, and, by default, the flesh it covers, and she asks me how it feels: to have seen this through.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I cannot tell yet.’

  The Ishiguro begins as a speck in our real view, not enhanced, not zoomed. I tell Hikaru to pull us towards it. It sits against the anomaly, or inside it – there is a fine line, and from here it is hard to tell – so it’s surrounded by blackness. Nothing inside, and it looks as if it isn’t real. But the Ishiguro is. We try making contact on the radio frequencies that it used to have, the same ones that were once used to send updates back to Earth, but there’s no answer. They didn’t have the external cameras that we do, or any sort of radar. They were never expecting to encounter anything else out here. Certainly not another ship. We have to alert them, because we don’t know how they might react, otherwise. Hikaru uses the boosters to push us forward, but it’s a slow crawl. We cannot risk touching the other ship. We didn’t contemplate anything colliding with us, not something like that. The metal of the outside is strong enough to let any debris bounce off, but not a whole ship. These are not cars; this is not something we could have foreseen, or tested. Haruki is cautious, therefore. Not too fast. But, there, in the flesh: the metal, the construction.

  There is no way of hailing them, so we have to get their attention some other way. We have the ship itself. We formulate a plan, there and then, Tomas and Hikaru and Tobi jabbering at each other. We will push ahead of it, external lights on, and we will make our way in front of it, while staying outside the anomaly: and then they can’t not see us. Dr Singer will see us. It is an easy solution.

  We will have our reunion then, is the hope.

  The anomaly itself is like a wall, here. We can see a shimmer, a shine on it. Something that makes the inside darker, like looking at the Ishiguro through glass: the way it slightly warps the light. Everything is dark inside the anomaly except the Ishiguro; a run of almost insignificantly small white lights along the stretch of its hull illuminating it, giving it shape and form, letting us see it. There is no light from the sun in there; nothing backlit. They designed the ship to shine, to sparkle: again, such a waste. Tomas tells us that we should not go inside the anomaly, that we should not even get close enough to touch it, not until we know more about it. I agree. Even though we can see the ship, and it’s perfectly healthy. Even though it is still somehow running.

  Hikaru draws us closer. We can see the plating on the side of the ship: almost perfect. As if it’s been out here no time at all. Closer still means hundreds of metres, at this scale. Inna’s fingers clasp tighter. Tobi makes little laughs under her breath, like yelps. Hikaru talks us through everything he does, every action, every button press, how much tension he’s putting on the stick, and his voice is calm and peaceful. And then we’re getting closer to it still, and Hikaru matches its speed so that we’re travelling alongside it: having it to starboard, behind its veneer. We can see the anomaly even better now, and it is less like glass here, more the surface of a puddle: perfectly clear but rippled in places, almost a murmur in the surface. Hikaru keeps doing what he’s doing, pushing the boosters to their limits. We feel it inside here, on the gravity: we are pushed backwards ourselves. We match the Ishiguro’s trajectory, but we are moving faster than they are, and then we’re at a position where, using our rear camera, we can see inside their ship almost: and they don’t have their lights on. Inside the ship it is almost as dark as the anomaly itself. There is no movement, and there is nothing visible. We do not have lights that we can shine inside, even. ‘Stay the course,’ I say. ‘They’ll notice us eventually.

  So we keep moving in front of them and Lennox asks, under his breath, ‘What’s wrong?’ because it’s obvious that something is.

  ‘Why is it so dark in there?’ Tobi asks. None of us can see anything, so we keep moving forward: we do not stop, and they do not stop.

  ‘Perhaps the good Doctor Singer’s eyes were tired,’ Tomas says. The delay runs to almost a minute, I think, but I have not counted it, and it will only get worse the further from Earth we get. I don’t answer him, because it would be pointless. This is not the time to wait for a conversation. The crew are looking to us – to me – so I choke orders out, to stay in control of this. To let them know that I am still in control.

  ‘Hikaru, keep us here. Lennox, try and find something to get their attention. We must have something.’

  ‘We can knock on their front door,’ Wallace says. ‘We can jettison something from the ship, to knock on the hull. They’ll notice that. Might get some movement inside.’

  ‘Good. Prepare that, then,’ I say. ‘We have to get out there and –’

  ‘Look,’ Tobi says. She points at the rear-camera screen, and the Ishiguro quickly dropping behind us. ‘They’ve stopped.’

  ‘They’ve seen us,’ I say. We fall silent, and Hikaru brings us to a stop, braking – they are not brakes, they are reverse boosters, really, but we think of them as what they are, in the service of what we are used to – and then Tomas speaks. His words are so much later than my words, thanks to the lag, and it is almost as if he’s correcting me, but it cannot be that.

  ‘They’ve seen you,’ he says. ‘You should stop.’ He cannot know that we already have, but we have. W
e are still, and so is the Ishiguro.

  We move backwards through space, nudging ourselves towards the Ishiguro in tiny increments. The thrusters were here for this reason: to allow us to move close to the anomaly, to allow us to hold position and not drift. They can fire in any direction, control on every point of each axis: another invention we wanted, that we bought, that we own. We are silent, all of us, watching instead of speaking: concentrating on the task at hand. We move backwards, reversing until we are alongside them. We peer into the cockpit, into the darkness inside the ship. And: to think that we nearly rejected the need for delicacy of movement in our engine system, and that this, right now, has justified the millions we spent on procuring the boosters.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ Hikaru asks as he draws us to a stop. We won’t drift: the boosters will anchor us, calculating exactly how to keep us steady, judging how much the ship is moving. She moves too much: they compensate. It’s delicate, but they are proven. We are still, and they look at me as if I know all the answers. I don’t, I want to tell them. We have to do something, but I do not know what.

  ‘We need a plan,’ I say, but then Tomas voice comes in, straight away, so quick it’s almost over mine.

  ‘Nobody must go out there,’ he says. ‘It might not be safe, and we don’t know about the anomaly yet.’ They all look at me here, as if I should argue this point. They want to know which of us is more in charge as much as I do. But as soon as he says it, I know that he is right. ‘Send a probe,’ he says. I nod at Lennox, and he drags himself through towards the engine rooms, where they are kept, then comes back minutes later. The thing is small and round: a research offshoot of the boosters below us, covered in tiny engines that use exhaust gases as propellant. He passes it to Wallace, who presses a button on it. Its LEDs glow blue and bright.