The Echo

by James Smythe

  ‘It seems very early,’ I said. ‘How do you know you won’t have forgotten about her in a week?’

  ‘And it would matter if I had?’ He sounded affronted. ‘I like her. You could make the effort.’ This was so soon after our mother died, and he was over-compensating. He had found a woman who made the kitchen smell like a stereotype should, and who wanted to take care of him. Who appreciated how hard he worked. ‘She wants to meet you.’

  ‘I’m surprised you even mentioned me.’

  ‘Of course I did. I told her all about what we’re working on, and how important you are.’

  ‘You broke the NDAs?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, they don’t count with her. She’s a baker, Mira, not a spy. She doesn’t care. She thinks it’s amazing, you know, what we’re working on.’

  ‘You’ve jeopardized everything,’ I said, ‘for this woman you barely know?’

  ‘Oh, goodnight, Brother,’ he said. He hung up the phone and ended the conversation, a conversation that was mine to end. I think that’s when it fell apart for us, because that’s when we stopped talking, apart from when we were at work. He said to me once, a few months after that, that my jealousy was ruining our relationship. That we were brothers and surely that was more important than whatever animosity I felt towards the woman that he loved.

  I tell him what has happened anyway, and I tell it to him every few hours in case he hears me. I send it out there to let him know what to expect, and how to prepare. When I finally get something back from him he sounds so exhausted and resigned. I say, ‘I’m so pleased to hear from you.’

  ‘I know,’ he replies, but he sounds as if he doesn’t feel the same. He is tired and sad, I think, as if he knows something that I do not. It’s the static, I tell myself: it warps everything. To him, I wonder how I sound. If I sound as eager as I fear, as happy to speak to him as I expect I do.

  ‘Are you far away?’ I ask when I get the chance.

  ‘Not far,’ he says.

  ‘You’re here for me?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, and then his voice is swallowed again. I spend the night surrounded by the screens as large as I can make them, in that blackness, and when it doesn’t feel real enough I go to the airlock and open the external door. I press my face to the plastic window of the internal one and I watch through, no sign that we’re even moving at all. I stay there for I don’t know how long, but it’s not out of pity: more a feeling that, despite how terrible it is out there, how I cannot understand what it is, we – that is, Tomas and I, working together as we should be – have beaten it.

  I don’t hear from him the next day. He is silent, even though I get static, and I wonder why. It makes me worry that whatever plan he had has fallen through, and that I’m now alone again.

  It doesn’t change how I spend my day. I spend it worrying: about fuel, air, Tomas. I can barely eat for the worry, so I try one of Hikaru’s white bars, one of the noodle bars. It’s so bland that I keep it down easily, and then I feel guilty. I think that this cycle is better than the one he died doing.

  Tomas speaks to me the next morning, and there’s a clarity to his voice, to the transmission. He says, ‘This will all work out, you know.’ He is trying to make me feel better, and to bolster my spirits. He is my brother.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘You sound closer.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And I am,’ I say. It’s nice. I smile, and I’m sure that he will be doing the same. It’s something synchronous; we always liked it when that happened. People would ask us if it didn’t annoy us, as twins, that we were lumped together. We would say that it made us feel better: that there were always the two of us in a situation, and we were so close that we knew we would never feel alone in our reactions. We always thought the same, until Mother died, until the baker, until this project pushed us apart. I say, ‘I’m glad that you didn’t forget about me.’

  ‘How could I?’ he says.

  ‘I thought that you were abandoning me before.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t do that.’ He still sounds so sad. I wonder if he has had just as much trouble getting to me as we had getting here in the first place.

  ‘Do you swear? That you won’t abandon me in here?’

  ‘I swear,’ he says.

  ‘How long until I see you?’ I ask.

  ‘Another twelve days, by my calculations,’ he says.

  ‘Twelve days? That’s all the fuel I have!’

  ‘It’s going to be close,’ he says. ‘Very close.’

  ‘And you’re heading towards me as well?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I can’t. It’s just you, Mira. It’s all on you.’ And then he’s gone, and I am alone again. Twelve days. I can do this. I have gone longer, I tell myself, when it was self-imposed.

  ‘Do you ever think back to when we were children?’ I ask him. I have always assumed that he never did: that he was too preoccupied with moving forward. Constantly moving forward, never dwelling on what happened before. ‘I think about it,’ I say, ‘because I wonder what made us who we were. What made us different.’

  ‘I think about it,’ he says. There’s such a fuzz on his voice, but so unmistakably him. ‘I think about it all the time.’

  ‘Because it mattered to you? I thought that we had a good childhood.’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘So what happened?’ I ask. The static is too strong, I think, because he doesn’t answer. So I lie there and try to sleep, and to forget about the gnawing inside me. Suddenly I find it difficult again. There is pressure on me now; and maybe I will miss something, something important. Maybe he will tell me something, and I will not hear it.

  15

  I don’t know if Tomas’ plan to rescue me involves me alone, or me and the ship. I tell myself that it would be nice to take this all back, considering who it is named after. It’s fine to have a backup, but it will have a different name. He will have named it something pompous and inglorious, I should imagine. A seemingly well-chosen word like Bravery or Temerity. Something that sounds like a ship’s name but that he feels represents a facet of himself and the trip we have made. Or that he will have made. Discovery, maybe. Maybe that’s too impressive. He’ll want some level of boastful subtlety. There is a part of me that wonders if the rescue he is conducting was part of this: that it’s a glory he will attain for himself, that I will have no part of. I wonder if he knew what would happen with the anomaly, and didn’t tell me. I suppose that it’s something I will always have to wonder.

  I clean everything top to bottom again. I want the ship to be in pristine condition when he sees it: to show that, while I could not save the crew, I have saved this. The investment; our creation. I clean out the beds that my crewmates’ bodies were put into. I change into one of the spacesuits, because then I can shut myself in their beds and breathe through the oxygen tanks, and I don’t need to worry about taking in their death. Besides which, the suits are comfortable. I can wear this through, and when he sees me, I will look as though I belong out here. I am a professional.

  I eat when I like. I try and talk to Tomas: this is a constant process, where I call for him and try to get him to answer. He crackles in, and he makes excuses, which is typical.

  ‘It’s hard to get a connection,’ he says.

  ‘Did you have to adapt the radios to the anomaly?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘How did you do it?’ I ask. I feel like I’m constantly suspicious.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘They just told me that they got it working.’ He’s lying. There’s nothing that he won’t understand when his staff explain it to him. And, for that matter, that he won’t have asked about. They will have said it was working; he will have wanted to know how. He’s an inquisitive mind.

  ‘What’s keeping you so busy?’ I ask.

  ‘Research,’ he says. He sounds exhausted, as if he’s not sleeping. If he’s anything like me, he isn’t, not at this stage of his trip. And he is exactly
like me.

  Eleven days. He is more talkative today, and I ask him how he is. He says, ‘I’m fine. I’m tired.’ He doesn’t ask how I am, but I tell him.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s been like,’ I say. ‘Out here, all alone. And how they all died.’

  ‘I know,’ he says.

  ‘No you don’t. You haven’t even asked about Inna and Hikaru. You haven’t asked me anything about what happened.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t you want to talk about it? Don’t you think we should?’

  ‘No,’ he says, then, ‘I’ve seen some parts, from the camera footage. I assumed you wouldn’t want to go into it.’

  ‘I have had nobody to talk to.’ I think about how weak this connection between us is: how much data could they have really streamed? ‘Where are you?’

  ‘The far side of the anomaly,’ he says.

  ‘Why is the connection so bad?’

  ‘You can’t expect it to be perfect,’ he tells me. ‘Not where we are, in this situation.’ He crackles. I feel like I am in some ancient comedy movie, and the man on the phone is faking driving into a tunnel. I don’t trust Tomas. I say it aloud – ‘I don’t trust you,’ I say – but I don’t know if he’s listening, because all I get from his end is the static.

  Ten days and the darkness is getting to be too much. The lights from the ship feel too artificial, and all I want from the minute that I wake up is to see something else real. I try to call Tomas but there’s no reply, so I think about what we have. I stare at the engines. I surround myself with screens of the outside, but it makes no difference. It reminds me of car drives when I was a kid, in storms. Parts of Europe where they didn’t have road-lights, and my stepfather would sometimes switch the lights off on the car to scare us. He would make a noise, and wobble the car, knowing the road so well that he knew how safe we were. Tomas and I would howl in that laughing-scared way. Fuck.

  I push myself to facing the floor. I am finally becoming adept at this, mastering how my body works here. I can see how it’s an art. I ache all over, but that’s probably an effect of how little I’ve been resting. And this puts such a stress on your bones. The bone loss is minute, but it’s there. Atrophy of muscles, loss of bone, wearing down of tissue. A slackening of what holds you together. I think about Easton, and what a zombie he was: barely even human. There is so much that I wish I could have asked him about his trip. That mystery, only partly solved. I wonder how this will play out from here on. I tell myself that I have no interest in ending my life like him, stuck in some loop I cannot escape from. Instead I will escape altogether.

  I can see nothing, though. There is something, I think, and then I realize it’s a reflection, the light from above making the floor shine through the projection of the screen. That makes me laugh: what here isn’t just reflection? The cycles; the darkness; so even.

  It’s been such a short amount of time without company, and yet I already understand how Cormac could go insane.

  Tomas will be waiting in the ship for me. It will not be the perfect trip that he envisioned, and I will be blameless in losing the crew of my trip, because the anomaly is so far beyond comprehension that it renders all blame ineffective, all concepts of understanding new. He will say, I’ve missed you. We’ll embrace. Do you know that we haven’t had an embrace since Mother’s funeral? He apologizes for what happened, for abandoning me. He explains: that it was never meant to be permanent, but that it was necessary. It was our goal, he said. (Even in my fantasies he is selfish.) He says, As soon as it happened I rerouted everything to save you, Brother. All of our resources, every single man and woman we have here working on the goal of saving you. You’ve been on the front page of every news-site, he tells me. He shows me them, the stories floating in the air on the screens. They proclaim me a Hero. I will ask about my crew, and if I am a pariah now. He says that the families understand. They gave their lives for the greater good, he says, ever the utilitarian.

  On the ship I will recover. We’re going home, Tomas will tell me. We’ll sleep that part of the journey: travelling faster. I’ll have a bed, and we will climb into ours, next to each other, and he will tell me what’s been happening as we go to sleep. He’ll tell me about the rescue effort, and how he decided to personally man the ship, and how the research part of our career – of our lives, when we get down to it – is complete. We have discovered the anomaly, he tells me, and that’s enough. We know what it is.

  What is it? I will ask him, and he’ll tell me. He’ll have it all worked out. All the work we did, the research. The thousands of hours. I’ll tell him that I have never felt like much of a scientist, and he’ll say, Don’t be ridiculous. You’re as much of one as I am. Look at what we have discovered, he’ll tell me. All you are now is a name in history, and whatever else you are from this point, that doesn’t matter. You can go and be quiet, if you like. You can take a life away from this. I’ll ask him what we will do, and he’ll say, Whatever you like. We’re brothers, and we’re meant to do this together.

  And I will tell him about what happened to me after he left me in the anomaly. I’ll tell him about Inna and Hikaru and their cycle, and Easton, how we found him. He will tell me that it’s okay that I don’t feel guilt. That I don’t really feel anything at all. I’ll tell him about Inna’s tattoo, and that she was ill. I won’t tell him about the scar that made the bird what it was, because that’s mine. Mine and hers.

  He’ll tell me to sleep then. There is something so comforting about that, being given that permission, so I will. I take his advice. He is older than I am, but not by much. And when we wake up, I can look out at the Earth coming towards us. It’ll be a marble first, and then bigger, and then we will be descending. We will come in like a plane, doing everything we can to slow our descent. This is the part I haven’t been looking forward to, I’ll tell him, and he’ll say, After what you’ve been through, this should be a breeze. I will notice that his birthmark is gone: dug out and rebuilt or recoloured or something, and that he looks exactly like I do. I’ll ask about it, and he’ll say, There was no point in either of us being more special than the other. I wanted parity. That will bring us closer together, and everything else the past however-many years will cease to matter.

  When we land there will be a press conference. They will ask me how hard it has been, the trip and the deaths and being alone. I’ll say, You don’t know how hard. The hardest thing. But then they’ll celebrate, and they will stop asking about Inna, and they’ll laud us for what we’ve done. A podium finish, like racing drivers, with champagne, myself and Tomas. Applause.

  At home, the baker will be there, and she will have made a cake. I can forgive her, I think. (I question my own fantasy, that she is still here. Maybe I don’t hate her as I thought.) The cake has my name on it: Mira, in stars. The next day Tomas and I go to our mother’s grave and we stand over it, and he says that he forgives me for how her life ended. He says, I am proud of you, Mira. Her grave says, Beloved Mother To Sons, and nothing else. Not our names, our full names, as he inscribed them. He’s changed it.

  We work with the agencies to help them look at the anomaly. They want to know if it’s still coming towards Earth, and what it will do when it arrives. They sit me down and ask me to describe what we’ll face. I say, I cannot. I leave. I go to the wilds, and we never speak of it, because we’ll be dead before it arrives. Because we have to be. I don’t know how that will happen, or where or when. But it will be coming.

  The fantasy ends quickly. I am alone and alive and in the ship, and I can see the nothingness.

  ‘Tomas?’ I ask.

  ‘I can’t talk,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’ There’s not even the pretence of static, or the realness of static, whichever. He just cuts the call. He sounds devastated. Like this is all coming to an end, or that he knows that it is somehow actually not at all real.

  Nine days.

  I am lost and lonely, and I am a man who needs to be the opposite of these thin
gs. I am a man who needs people, I have discovered; or a specific person. Tomas’ presence has lightened my mood, and my feelings. It has made me feel less as though this is inevitable. As if maybe I will get out of this alive.

  I clean more, as if that is all I have to do. There is a part of the ship where the blood has crusted a seal, and I can see the line where it is. It has snuck inside the bowels of the ship herself, and I decide that I want to clean this. I cannot get the cleaning instruments into the gap enough, where the wall and the floor meet, which means I have to go inside the wall to reach it. In the engine rooms there is panel to allow the engineering team to reach the insides of the ship. All around the thing, around every room, there is at least a foot of space between the interior and the start of the hull. They could get into it, to fit everything, to make sure that the turbine – which circles every part of the ship – works properly. The panel is easily removed, and then I can see into the ship itself. It’s like a secret: seeing how something works. I think of Inna, and I climb in. A tight fit, for a few feet, and then I’m behind the wall. It’s warm and dark. The turbine is off, so I can be in here. Otherwise the ring inside the hull would rotate, like the drum of a washing machine, and I would be killed. I creep forward, knowing where to go. It’s close. They press against me, the walls, and I edge into where it is even darker. There’s no light bleed until you reach the edge of a room, and then I am tracking along the corridor. A dip as I reach the changing rooms, the airlock, and I have to enter a smaller passage, a crawl-space. It runs underneath the airlock itself, and it’s hard: hauling myself down, trying to stay under there. Pressed up against it, on my back, pulling myself along. Under here, it smells of something stale and metallic, which means I am at the right place. I feel it with my fingers: the blood. I don’t know whose it is, but I clean it as best I can. In here, it’s so dark: I only make it lighter when I get the blood out of the crack and the light from the room can poke through.

  Getting the blood all gone from the ship is good. It’s better. It feels cathartic, as if maybe, for a second, I can pretend that this never happened. I go from room to room and check everything, and I finally cannot see any anywhere. The ship is clean, almost back to where it started. I am the only evidence that we have ever been anywhere. Me, and the empty drawers.