The Echo taq-2

by James Smythe

  I send Tomas a message, direct to his console. I do not bother trying to speak to him, because I want to be certain that he will receive this. ‘I think we have to come home now,’ I say. I will try to forget about Inna. I will try.

  According to Hikaru, we’re on about 50 per cent of our life support – a number that would be much lower if we were supporting a fully live crew, rather than one that is all but deceased – so we can’t stay here much longer. Stolen from the Ishiguro, we need the rumble of our engines to recharge us: a sense of moving forward to sustain us. There are limits, and protections, and cut-off points that we do not want to reach. I am contemplating, always contemplating telling Hikaru to start the engines; I cannot predict how he would react now, if I suggested abandoning Inna. Tomas will turn us around if everything falls apart. We agreed, when designing the systems, that the overrides from ground control would be final. You never know what can happen up here, but there they would always be in control.

  Hikaru is speaking to Inna this time. He said that he wanted to talk to her, to try and ease her through this. I told him to be my guest. I do not watch them, because nothing about this can surprise me any more. Instead, I go to a cupboard and count the stims we have left. I take another. We are fine. We have so many on board it is as if I knew that I would need them, when I was checking the inventories. I try to reach Tomas on the comm as I am still in that tablet’s rush. By the time I get his reply it has passed, and I feel normal again.

  ‘Brother,’ he says.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been in conferences. We have been trying to decide what to do.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  ‘I got your message. We all took it into consideration, that’s for sure.’ He gulps something. I picture him, his stubby glass, his single malt. We both know what it means before he says the rest. ‘You have to get some results, Mirakel. Then you can come back.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Tomas.’

  ‘The board reminded me of the cost of this. The spend. And it’s the best we can hope. We know that this thing isn’t normal, as well.’ The pauses are unnatural and elongated. I cannot parse them in the patter of normal speech. ‘Didn’t you want to leave your mark?’

  ‘We have left it. We have three bodies on our hands.’

  ‘But their blood isn’t. They signed the waivers, just as you and I did.’

  ‘And you’re in such a risky position, there, with your fucking drink and your fucking baker.’ I laugh at how ridiculous this argument is. That I won’t even call her by her name. He goes silent. There is always silence between us, and it is always me that it falls upon to break it. ‘What do you want us to do?’

  ‘That’s harder,’ he says. I hear the click of him lighting a cigarette. ‘They want readings taken from inside the anomaly.’

  ‘We are not taking the ship in there.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be the ship. Send a tablet over: get pings from that. See how deep it is. Use Inna: give her the equipment on her side. She needs to send signals inside it, see if we can read them from Earth. Just to see.’

  ‘She’ll want to know why I’m not coming in to take the readings myself.’

  ‘So you tell her a lie,’ he says. I can hear it in his voice; in the drag of the smoke, the exhale with the impatience. ‘You’ve done it before.’

  ‘There are two of us left, that’s all. You think that this is going to end well?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you really think that we’re coming home?’ I realize that I am shouting. I wonder if Hikaru can hear me. I hope he can, because maybe then he will react, and I will not have to. ‘The longer we stay here, the more likely it is that we will die here.’

  ‘They want readings. We all want readings. And we want for you to rescue Inna, as well. Or maybe you’re just happy to leave her there to die, again and again and again, for the rest of all time?’

  ‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘I don’t care what you say to me,’ he replies. ‘Take the ship closer, and take the readings.’ Then he’s quiet. The argument, driven by the lag, makes me wonder if there’s more coming. It’s too tense: the silence between the words. ‘I’ll talk to Inna for her next cycle. Give you some time to relax.’ Then he’s gone.

  I stay in the lab. Bring up the map of the anomaly that we have been making: the spinning orange, still being made from the dots, still having gaps filled in. I calculate: estimating the size of the thing if this is essentially an orb, as deep and tall as it is wide, using the trajectory of the curve to estimate where it is heading. I move my finger into it, breaking the line of the anomaly, and I move it back and forth. I put a pin into the image where Inna is, another where we – the ship, myself and Hikaru and all our bodies – are, and I move the ship closer to see how close we can be before this all becomes truly dangerous, and I chicken out and turn the ship around myself.

  I wonder what would happen if we managed to get the ship back to Earth. If I found a way to supersede the instructions that Tomas would desperately send to prevent us. The mission wasn’t military, so I couldn’t be court-martialled. It wasn’t governmental, so there’s no way I would be committing some law-break that might earn me jail time. It’s private: business and investors and some degree of public faith. They would lambast me, and they would attempt to sue, I would think. They would claim that we – and I suspect that Tomas would be thrown under the bus as well, unless he sacrificed me – had squandered their money. That, in our weak-willed frippery, we had travelled this far, spending billions of dollars, and that we had returned empty-handed, with four deaths under our belts. (In the scenario where I flee, I tell them that Inna has died. It is true, at least a part of the time.) The anomaly, they would say, is still out there. It is still a potential threat. Do we understand it any more than we did before these two ran their hands over our space program? We do not, they would say. We are, in fact, more in the dark. Because how do you lose so many crew members? How does a crew of six go up, and only two come back down?

  I wouldn’t have an answer for them. I call Hikaru into the lab and tell him what it is that we’re going to have to do in order to appease them. I show him, on the map, how close we need to get. He nods, and he chews a bar made of re-formed bleached chicken, and I can tell that he has no faith at all in our ability to survive this, but he will never say that. He will not let me know.

  11

  Persuading the crew to come out here was easy. This was always to be a trip that would be remembered, and the probability – we told them – of a tragedy such as that which occurred with the Ishiguro happening twice were next to inconsequential. Tomas used to say: The chances of one ship going missing in space are pretty slim. The chances of two going missing in the same place? So close to nil as to be almost impossible. We will, Tomas and I wrote to each of them in our letter of persuasion, guarantee your safe return. They needed that persuasion, because they were happy before we found them; or at least comfortable. They had families and jobs and lives. We wrote personalized letters to those candidates we most desired for the roles that we had to fill. Paper letters, hand-written, mostly by me, as Tomas’ handwriting left a lot to be desired. He preferred the speed of a quick draft where I favoured the dedication of precision and care. But they were our words: a joint effort. A month after the letters went out we fielded visits from a few of them: that was when we found Hikaru and Tobi. Both in our first round of choices. Both so strong and capable. They were interested, because how could they not be? What a chance this was, for all of us. We told them about the training that they would need to undertake and the work we would be doing. We told them about the risks involved. We told them that they would have to take out their own insurance policies, knowing that they would not be able to. Everything about this is a risk, we told them; but without risk there can be no true reward.

  ‘What is the reward, exactly?’ Hikaru had asked.

  ‘Answers,’ Tomas had to
ld him. ‘Science is a pursuit. Answers are there, and we seek them. We need answers to a question, because humans are made to question. Now we have a question that nobody can answer, but we might somehow be able to. Think about that. Wouldn’t you like to play a part in getting an answer to what might be the biggest question of all?’ They didn’t ask what the question was. That’s the thing: they never even wanted to know, not really.

  It’s amazing: standing in the airlock and leaving the external door open, and being able to see right across to Inna. This is how adjacent we are: she opens her eyes when we have stopped moving, when the thrusters are only there to maintain our position. We’re like lovers, greeting each other on a dock: she cannot see me through the fog, but I am there. She only has half an hour left, and she will die. So it goes.

  Hikaru and I prepare the tablet to give to Inna. We designed the computers to be detachable in part, so that we could work outside if we needed to. They were tested for pressure, designed to have special haptic interfaces that would work with the suits: we were prepared for this. This is forethought. They have attachments, and we configure one to be able to send a ping out: only to judge distances, but it’s something. We haven’t been able to see deep into the anomaly before. We don’t even know how deep it is. Maybe, I think, it could go on forever. It is a tunnel. It is a hole. This thing looks like any other tablet computer, so we agree to ask Inna to take it, hold it while we remotely control it, and then pass it back for the results to be uploaded. Should be simple: easy to use, nothing she won’t be used to in her life of medical instruments and tricorders. We need her in control, so Tomas suggests that we wait until this cycle has ended. I couldn’t agree with him more, but I’m glad that I don’t have to say it. I wonder if Hikaru is starting to hate me for the ease with which I let her die. He can maybe see how I would be with him. I would be the same, I know. Maybe more callous. I feel something for Inna, I think. I have a desire for her that I do not share for him. I wouldn’t blame him if he hated me. I don’t know what that says about me. I think that, when we get home, I should maybe speak to somebody. I wonder about myself. I see something inside me, or maybe I do not see it. Maybe there is simply something that is not there.

  I see the toll that it is taking on Hikaru as well. With him, it seems deeper (but then, I suppose that the afflicted would always say that). I thought that he was tuned into his religion, his powerful self-beliefs driving his action. The more time I spend with him, however, it simply seems as if he is broken. I have offered him the chance to speak to his family, but he has turned it down. Perhaps he knows that it was the last thing that Wallace did before he ended it, and perhaps that carries a significance for him. It’s his own business. In my reports, I will write that I believe he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I will recommend treatments, but I am sure that he will refuse them.

  I pull on my suit and am ready to go. I am a heavy breather, and I tell myself that I must be light to preserve my air. I have to pace myself. I stand in the airlock and we listen to her die, because we have to know as soon as she is alive again. She gasps and screams and asks what is happening, and I speak to her. I tell her exactly what we need.

  ‘Quickly,’ I say, ‘we don’t have much time.’ I explain to her that there’s been an accident, and Hikaru starts the airlock cycle. She asks me why she can’t see me properly, and I explain that I am there. I am with her, I say, but the anomaly blocks her from looking out. I say, ‘You have to help me. You’re stuck there until we can find out how to get you free, and you are running out of air. We have to be quick, and then we can get home. The device I want you to use, it’ll help us.’

  ‘Why can’t I come back now?’ She requires a delicate balance when being dealt with. It must be scary, to be out there, alone and on a countdown. I know that it is scary. It has scared her countless times before this.

  ‘You’re trapped’, I say, ‘in the anomaly. Do you not remember?’ Treat her as if this is her mistake. As if she should know more than this. Assert myself.

  ‘Of course I remember,’ she says. She’s so hurried and frantic that she lies to me, because she knows that it’s easier.

  ‘We need to find out how to get you free.’

  ‘And this will do it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘This is how we begin to get you out.’ I pass her the tablet. ‘It turns on at the top,’ I say. She presses the button; there’re a few hours or so of battery on it. More than enough for what we need to do, and for her to pass it back before she dies and it gets lost, or drifts off, or whatever. ‘It’s all controlled on the screen. Do you see the apps you need to run?’

  ‘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 t
urn 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.