The Echo

by James Smythe

  ‘You’re sure about this?’ he asks. Tomas is listening but doesn’t chime in. He’ll have his own people on this. They are working with the lag against them, which is a disadvantage for him.

  ‘It has to be a ship,’ I say. I feel like I only talk in vagaries, not absolutes. The mark of a good scientist, Tomas used to say, is in the absolutes, though even he is lost here. I can tell because he is silent. For the first time, he is as preoccupied as I am.

  ‘Could it be aliens?’ Lennox asks.

  ‘Don’t say that word.’

  He laughs. ‘Fine, it has to be something else, then. That’s only logical, right?’ I know exactly what he’s talking about. We all know, all of us. There are very few options, and one of them is that it is the Ishiguro. That would mean that it has been out here for over twenty years. It would mean that it is a freak, a fluke. Something that should not be. To see it still moving, and still with power, after so long? And the fact that it has stopped, now, would suggest that it’s crewed still. That cannot be right. The crew would have succumbed long ago. They would have given up, gone insane, run out of food, their muscles and bones atrophied and worn down. No way they’re running off their own batteries – that’s true perpetual energy, there is no way that it can be that – and there is no way that they’ve found fuel. So it’s not crewed, because there will be no life support. But there’s fuel? Perhaps it’s set to a cycle? Back then, the system was entirely run by computer, by a programmed set of instructions designed to be foolproof. There was barely any need for a pilot. It was a totally flawed idea, totally and utterly flawed. You can’t test code in the field like that, not when there’re lives at stake. Not when there’re a mission to be done.

  Lennox has raised another screen, a smaller one, and he’s called up an image of the Ishiguro. We drag the picture of the ship itself across to the bigger screen, compress it to the right size and lie it on top of the unrecognizable thing, and it’s a perfect fit for the general shape and colour, but other than that we can’t tell. When he isn’t looking, I take another stim, and there’s that rush of a faster frame-rate when I feel like I could do anything, but that fades, and I am still left looking at the same shapes, trying to make them fit.

  In the middle of the night, with the rest of the crew asleep, I drift to the cockpit and cradle myself into the seat there, attach the magnets to stop me drifting. It’s Tobi’s shift. She looks over at me, and then reaches into her pocket.

  ‘Wait,’ she says. She fiddles with her face, and then she pulls back, and I see that she is wearing a patch across it: like a pirate. She laughs out loud, a sudden exclamation of her own amusement. I do not. ‘I found it in the medical stores,’ she says. ‘You like it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. I don’t know if I say it wrong, but she reads it as a lack of amusement, and she turns professional.

  ‘You need something?’ she asks.

  ‘We have to change our destination,’ I say. ‘Only slightly, but we have to.’

  ‘Where to?’ We’ve had a course decided for years now: into the centre of what we understand to be the anomaly. But the ship we’ve found has changed everything: it’s higher, in the scale of things, based on how far we think the anomaly stretches. Still the anomaly. Still our mission, not forgoing that for even a second, but it’s something else. Two birds with one stone, I think. It could be. If it is the Ishiguro, if it is inside the anomaly, if it has been for the past two decades, think of what we could learn from it. Think of the things that its sensors could tell us.

  ‘Plot a course for it.’

  ‘The other ship?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Everybody signed off on it?’ She means Tomas.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. He hasn’t, but he will. He would. She nods, and she starts typing onto her keyboard, changing what she needs to. She can tweak the trajectory with the boosters; such a subtle change, enacted over the next few hundred miles. Easy as anything. ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she says. I start to unclip myself, but she stops me. She puts her hand out, blocking me. ‘I have a favour,’ she says.

  ‘Oh?’ I say. I am thinking about the ship: the screens here are now full of her calculations, and I can’t see it. It could have changed. This could all have changed while I am sitting here, getting away from me, the situation developing.

  ‘Wallace’s family,’ she says. ‘He really wants to speak to them. Can you let him call them?’ She doesn’t make eye contact with me. She keeps working. She is showing me how diligent she is. This is like a trade for her; even with her ailment, she is working hard. They are all working hard.

  ‘He has already asked me that himself,’ I say.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So I have to give the same answer.’ She doesn’t look at me. She types. ‘You know what it will cost to let him do that.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘But, Jesus. Come on.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. I drift upwards and turn and kick off, back towards the lab. When I am at my console I take another stim. The image is getting slightly clearer. I’m there watching the pin and the ship as a tiny burst of light, no more than a few pixels wide, comes from the rear of the thing – of the ship – and the ship starts moving again.

  ‘Tomas,’ I say. ‘Tomas.’ He’s still asleep. That’s the difference between him and me: how far we’re willing to go.

  6

  Somehow, I am asleep; and somehow, I have a dream about Inna.

  I cannot really see her: only a shimmer of her flesh as I chase her through the corridors. I have skills that I don’t have in real life, the ability to dance through this lack of gravity as if I was born in it. I catch glimpses of Inna’s tattoos as I chase her: the head of that bird, and in my dream, the way it coils around her body, turning into chimera, bird and snake and lion, all drawn around her body. She stops and turns, and the tattoos shift around her, like a story come to life. The lion eats the bird. The bird eats the snake. The snake somehow consumes the lion, slackening and dropping its jaws and taking it all in. This is all I can see: the swirling colours of the animals, so bright and crisp and deadly.

  I wake up and I am at the console, and I am drifting slightly upwards, my body slack. It’s scary, this feeling; and my mouth is dry, and my neck throbs and aches. ‘It’s definitely the Ishiguro,’ Tomas says over the speakers, and that is what wakes me. I look at a clock: I have been asleep for three hours, as best I can tell. I don’t know how it happened. I must have passed out when the last lot of pills ran their course, and my body did the rest. I had been awake for a long time before that. Hours and hours.

  ‘I can see it,’ I say, but my voice croaks. I find the stims and the water and I wash one down with the other, and I feel so much better for a second, and then slip into normality. I peer in at the ship. The distinctive hull shape. The fringe of colours that runs the rim. The distinctive stamp of the name on the side, as they used to do with galleons. Curlicued and delicate writing, at odds with the presentation of the rest of the ship. It’s a blur, and still slightly pixelated, like some old video game from a museum: constructed of the individual blocks. ‘That’s confirmation.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I’ve already told Tobi to change course and head towards it.’

  ‘She told me.’ She double-checked with him. My word was not enough.

  ‘Have you told anybody else?’ I ask. He knows what I mean: the UNSA, who will, in turn, tell the press. The funding opportunities for this trip, which were tight before, would be boundless if the world knew what we had found. The world was, once upon a time, united in their grief for the Ishiguro. To find it now would have implications.

  ‘Nobody else knows yet,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t make sense to cause questions to be asked before we even know the answers. You should tell the crew, though,’ he says. This is his gift to me. This is a give: a way for me to get a win, for them to see me as a real leader. This is a farce, the way that we are. He probably wants me to thank him.
‘You should do it soon,’ he says. ‘They’ll be wondering. You should confirm it with them.’ He sounds distant, as if this isn’t where his focus is.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, and I pull myself to the corridor. They are waiting and watching, because they know that something important is about to happen. When they see me it is permission, and they come and they gasp, and I cling to the wall at the back of the room. Tomas talks them through what I have found, and they coo and speculate out loud, and they ask questions: but he answers them all, even though neither of us has any of the answers.

  My brother’s full and complete name was printed first on our initial funding pitch: Tomas Johannes Hyvönen, named after both grandfather and great-grandfather, the two most important male names in my mother’s life, both claimed and consumed before I even squeezed my way out of her. He was the one with the previous positive funding experience; it was easiest to go with what you know, I granted him that. Dr Tomas and Dr Mirakel, my full name because the funding committees needed to be able to look us up. (He said once, Why not change your name? Legally, pick a new one that sounds better. This was after our mother had died, and I said, It seems wrong. This is the only part that’s left, and she loved it. So it stays. He even suggested alternatives. John. James. Boring biblical names, dull names. Is it better to be a joke than to be staid?) So after that his was the name that the board wrote to, to tell him of our successful pitch. He had the letter arrive at his house, read it before me, and he called me up and sent a scan of it across for me to look at. He framed it, the original, and hung it in his office. That was the precedent: they called him when they had issues, and he was the first port of call for interviews and articles. In photographs, he was placed in front, because the birth mark – a crutch in a time where genetics couldn’t be modified willy-nilly, but now, for us, something to flaunt, a statement – singled him out and sold issues of magazines and newspapers. It made him a spokesman, and I his parrot, sitting behind his shoulder, repeating that which he had already said. One interview for a television show, as we headed towards the process where we would start to pick the crew, was taken by him alone. They explained that there wasn’t enough room on the sofa – next to the presenters and the other guests – for two. He spoke about the mission in singular absolutes – I, Me, Mine – and then tasted food designed to be eaten in space, freeze-dried but created by a celebrity chef, and then he laughed at a comedian who joked about motorways and the inherent dangers of them versus space travel. I watched from the green room, on a small monitor, and I ate biscuits and drank weak lemon tea.

  And when we went on television to announce the date of the launch, it was Tomas who spoke. He told them and he took the applause, and I sat quietly by his side. Scalded, almost.

  I take another stim and miss another sleep, which is fine, because it means I do not have to worry: about sleep, or the day to come, or anything. Instead I sit in the lab and watch the ship get clearer and clearer. It stops again, only briefly this time, and then continues on its way. I don’t speak to Tomas, even though I hear him talking to the rest of the crew as they wake up. I don’t even bother to eavesdrop, because it’s immaterial what they’re saying. Tobi says it’s only another twenty-four hours until we’re close enough to see the ship better. Now, it’s the size of a fingernail. By then it might well be the size of a fist.

  Inna tells me that I should sleep, or rest. She stands in the doorway. She has mastered, in her graceful ways of movement, a manoeuvre where she touches the floor with the tips of her feet, letting them drag slightly along the plastic as she moves. From behind it looks as though she’s balancing on them, creeping on tiptoes so pointed that they suggest a ballerina who has managed to break the laws of physics. Now she floats in front of me. I try to pay attention to her, but the ship is still there.

  ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘You must have been awake for hours.’

  ‘I won’t be much longer,’ I say. I remember my dream again; and her tattoo. ‘I have work to do. Not too much. I’ll sleep soon.’

  ‘Or you’ll sleep now,’ she says. ‘Do I have to come over there and force you?’ I don’t answer, or move. She sighs and sinks towards me. ‘Mirakel, you have to sleep. We need you at your best.’

  ‘You used my full name,’ I say.

  ‘I shouldn’t?’

  ‘No,’ I say. I do not say: it forces people to take me less seriously. They mistake me for a fool. They think that I am temporary, or somehow worthless. They treat me as a child, as somebody that needs their assistance. Mirakel is a different person: I left him when I stopped being a child. ‘I prefer Mira, honestly.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. She reaches out for me, and she takes my arm, holding my hand at the wrist.

  ‘It’s no matter.’

  ‘But my point stands,’ she says. ‘I am tired. You are tired. We are all tired. Being here, it’s one of the most tiring things you can do. Your body isn’t meant for this, and you have to deal with it properly. So, sleep, and then tomorrow you’ll do some exercise.’ I unclip myself and allow her to pull me away from the console, and she pushes off the wall and into the corridor, putting her weight into it. It’s easier this way. To let her lead. Her hand is warm. Here, we keep the air cool. You don’t want to get hot here, no sweat peeling itself off your forehead into globules that drift and threaten to collide with others. Far better to be nice and cool. But her hand is still so warm, warmer than I’m used to. I don’t remark on it, but it’s nice. She takes me down the corridor and to the living quarters, where the others ready themselves for bed. She doesn’t know about the stim I took only a few hours ago. She grabs the lid of my bed and grips it, as if she is holding it open for me. As if the entire apparatus isn’t automated. ‘Okay,’ she says. She watches me climb in and strap myself down, and then she smiles and shuts the lid to the bed and I lie there in the dark and don’t sleep. I listen as much as I can, through the seal, and the others gradually shut their own beds. The one next to me, Inna’s, I listen for that seal, and as soon as it hisses I count to a hundred – eyes pinned open by the stims, no chance of me accidentally drifting anywhere in this thing – and then crack the lid. The ship is quiet; Tobi is in the cockpit. I don’t say anything to her. It is none of her business how much I sleep.

  I watch the Ishiguro on the screens in the lab. It moves. It gets larger, slowly, bit by bit, as if it is swelling.

  Because I never leave its side, or because I am here almost the entire time, there is no danger of me missing the developments. Now, I see it stop again: once more it slowly grinds to a halt. I imagine them inside: their artificial gravity generator doing its work, ruining the experience of this: making them feel as if they are on a train, travelling forward on a path, no bumps or variation. I don’t know if I am imagining them now or then: what they would be like now, twenty years after the fact. I have so many questions for them. I want to know what they have seen. I want to know what happened. I want to know why they have not made it home. In my worst daydreams, the starting and stopping is a malfunction of the computers, degraded and useless; and the ship is full of their corpses; and there are no answers to be gained from this, only a husk of metal that doesn’t belong out here. We have the image stretched as large as we can, but it’s not enough. I want more. I lean in, so close that the vapours of the holo are almost overpowering, but it’s what I need to do. I need to see this. I can see the plating, and I can see the engines, and I can almost see details in them, that’s how close we are. It is deceptive: we are still four days away. Through the use of the bounce, we have a camera so powerful and important that we can almost see into the future, and here I am, watching a ship from the past, stopped still in the expanse.

  Then I see it: something else. A speck, a dot, circling the ship. Only a few pixels, even at this resolution. It is small and it is white, and it seems to float and then cling to the side of the Ishiguro, and I can only just make it out: arms and legs and the solid lump of a body holding them all together.

&nbs
p; ‘There’s somebody alive out there,’ I tell Tomas. I send the message across space to him, but I don’t leave the channel open to wait for a reply, and he doesn’t try to instigate one. I heave myself to the living quarters and hammer my fists on the lid of Lennox’s bed, and Wallace’s, and they all wake up one by one, an hour before they’re meant to. I’m telling Tobi what I found as they blearily join the conversation, and I have to repeat myself four or five times, over and over, but I never get tired to saying it. ‘Come on,’ I say, and I lead them, like the Pied Piper, to the observation lab.

  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.’