by James Smythe
The engines accelerate to a point where we break a faster speed than any man-made machine before. In the glory days of space travel, when we were still trying, the shuttles hit speeds of nearly twenty thousand miles per hour, when they were in orbit. We’re doubling that; more, even, when we reach maximum acceleration. Tripling it. And then we will coast, using that momentum, slowing to maintain that speed only, holding it as long and as far as we can. That’s the rumble. Every part of this ship is made from materials built to withstand that pressure, joists and fixtures made with composite materials that didn’t even exist a decade ago. The metal of the hull is our own: we bought the man who designed it, all of his patents, all of his designs. I think of this, of the blueprints now: flashing through my mind. His metal shakes like everything else, though. No amount of stress testing can prevent it feeling as if it is falling apart. We didn’t tell the crew that. We told them that every possibility had been accounted for. We lied, because how else do you get people to agree to something like this?
‘One,’ Tomas says, or I think it’s Tomas. Maybe I’ve been counting down with him, speaking at the same time, my voice along with his. The launch happens, and the craft shakes and lurches, and I hit my head, over and over, on the hard plastic part of the bed that is moulded to me instead of being a pillow, practicality not comfort, and I think that that’s yet another oversight. We should have had a pillow; then, maybe my head wouldn’t hit this so hard.
Everything gives way to darkness. This isn’t sleep: this is my body giving up.
Man wasn’t meant to see this. Man was meant to stay on the ground. My mother said that she believed in angels, and maybe she was right. What are the implications of travelling as fast as we’re suggesting? That’s what I asked Tomas. I said, Really, the actual implications. Do we know? We put carcasses in the centrifuge, reaching g forces equivalent to this, and we watched them quiver and be pulverized. So I said, Are we sure that this is the right thing? What are the implications? He said, The implications are that you’ll have travelled faster than anybody before you. You know what I mean. He sighed. It could break you. You’ll feel it, whatever happens. It’ll pull every part of you. So we make them sleep, I suggested, because then they’ll not know. They’ll wake up feeling like they’ve been in a fight, and not knowing who hit them. Oh, they’ll know, he said.
I open my eyes, like instinct, but it hurts. Everything’s glowing white, I would swear: even though the lights are off and my glass is dimmed, it glows.
White, white, white. Almost painful, it’s so bright.
I try and open them again, to see, and it feels like they’re being pressed on, forced and pushed down, and everything’s white when it should be black. My body can’t move, I discover. I wish I was like the others, safe and asleep. They don’t know what their bodies are going through. I can feel the bones in my face – the very essence of my skull, everything, underneath the skin, underneath all of me, every little part – and it feels as if it is being pulled apart.
I am in hell.
3
When I next open my eyes, it’s quiet. The rumble is gone, and it’s dark. My eyes hurt: all I can really see, apart from the darkness, are after-images of flashing white, as if I’ve been staring too closely at the sun. The beds hiss open, including mine. I hear Tomas’ voice.
‘Time to wake up, rise and shine,’ he says. The pressure of the sealed beds is meant to keep us asleep until the time the beds open, and the lights are turned on. The blackness around the sunspots in my eyes goes white as well, brighter than the rest, and I can’t see. I shut my eyes but the glow comes through the eyelids, so I try to turn my head. The beds are fully open. I hear voices.
‘Wow,’ says Lennox. ‘Holy shit, that hurts.’ He’s floating upwards, arching his back. ‘Oh my word.’ I hear something click.
‘What was that?’ asks Tobi, and Lennox laughs.
‘My bloody back,’ he says. ‘That noise was my bloody back.’
‘Move slowly, all of you,’ Inna says. ‘Stretch, sure, but be gentle with it.’
‘You never warned us about this,’ Wallace says. ‘Jesus Christ, I feel like I’ve been in a bar fight.’ The others laugh. ‘Tomas, where are we?’ There’s a slight pause as the transmission is sent back to Tomas, on Earth still. I wonder if he’s slept yet.
‘You’re in space,’ Tomas eventually says, his voice coming through a slight crackle. (Only a few seconds’ wait. That will get longer, I know.) The crew laugh again, and then coo. This is realized: we’re out here, wherever here is. ‘Call up the maps, that’ll show your position.’
‘How fast are we going?’
Another wait, then Tomas answers. ‘Forty-six,’ he says. ‘And that’s locked in. Engines resting.’ The delay here is really nothing. It’ll get worse the further we go. And it’s crystal clear. Used to be that, this far out, you’d be speaking through the hiss, hoping the message would get through, biting your nails. Another piece of technology that made all of this possible. ‘Is everybody awake, everybody okay?’ None of them say anything, but their silence is enough. I still haven’t opened my eyes, but I can feel theirs on me: wondering why I’m lying as I am, stretched out and strapped in still. They stay silent. I can hear them wondering. Tomas guesses. ‘Mira, are you up? Are you awake?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Not yet.’ I try my eyes again, and they work – I can see the blurred shapes of the crew past the spots – so I swing my legs out, haul my body up. It feels worse than I ever imagined. I’ve never been a fighter. I never knew what this might feel like, when the analogy was presented. I could only guess.
‘Up and at ’em,’ Tomas says. ‘I need you to start running tests. Begin with the batteries. We need to make sure they’re recharging properly for when we need to decelerate.’ Everything that isn’t the engine here is run off a battery. We took very few things from the previous space-flight attempts – the previous and failed attempts, by the South Asian Space Agency in the twenties, the Ishiguro not long after them – but we took their battery systems. Piezoelectric energy. It converts the vibrations of the ship into power. The rumble that we went through during launch, the slight shudder of the engines through the hull, even the repercussions of us being inside here and interacting with the ship herself, it all ends up as energy. It’s what keeps the lights on, the ship warm, and us alive. In a worst-case scenario, we’ve even posited that it could get us home, powering the tiny boosters that we would otherwise use as stabilizers. Worst-case. But the power is therefore precious. If they had to – we’re adrift, the fuel fails, something – the batteries are what would keep us alive. Though, they burn power a lot faster than they generate it. When we decelerate, when we’re reaching the anomaly, we need to sleep again: the pressure change, all over again. I cannot even think about that now. ‘I’ll give you a minute,’ Tomas says.
I feel a hand on my arm, and a face close to mine. ‘Are you okay?’ Inna asks. Her breath smells of mint, already, as if this is something she has taken care of before anything else. I dread to think about mine. That is such a small thing.
‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘Something went wrong, with the injection.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I didn’t sleep. I was awake through the launch.’
She squeezes my arm. Her nails: I can feel them on my skin, pressing down. ‘That’s a common dream, I think. When people are sedated, they manifest dreams of what they feel that they’re missing. It’s really a very common thing.’
‘I was awake,’ I protest, ‘and then I passed out. I hit my head.’
‘Well, you seem okay now,’ she says. She runs her hand behind my skull, to feel for a lump, maybe. She doesn’t believe me. It doesn’t matter. ‘Open your eyes for me,’ she says.
‘It’s too bright,’ I tell her.
‘Let me look.’ I feel her hand on my forehead, shielding me from the light. She stands in front of me, casting me in shadow. I open my eyes, and I can see her, past the after-image. She�
��s close, peering at me. ‘They’re fine,’ she says. I can feel her breath on my face, somehow both cool and warm. ‘Pupils dilated, but that’s okay. They’ll settle. You’re fine,’ she says. She steps back, and I blink. Only the spots remain, but everything else starts to slip into focus. The crew are all staring at me.
‘I’m okay,’ I say. They are professional, as am I. They know that what we need to do now is worry about the rest of the mission. This is a mission, where the Ishiguro was, what, a jaunt? And I am a scientist, not an action hero. In the old days, there used to be rules: astronauts had to conform to certain physical and mental presets in order to be able to undertake their missions. They had to be psychologically proofed to within an inch of their minds, ready and willing and able to take on whatever challenges would be hurled at them. And when Tomas and I were planning this, we said that our crew would adhere to those rules. You look at the Ishiguro, at what went wrong, and they started with their crew. Faces that were too pretty, faces made for television. People with inadequate training – six months, only, where we decided that eighteen was the minimum. And a journalist up there with them, purely so that they could secure more funding. The day that they went, they found out that his wife had killed herself, and still they let him go! It was madness. Tomas was adamant: that sort of thing wouldn’t be happening on our voyage. On ours, our crew would be right for the task at hand, multi-disciplinary. The correct people, above all else. When we spoke about it, in my mind, Tomas was the one up here. I assumed, I think, because maybe he seemed to win more coin tosses than I did. But the rest of the crew, in my mind, were to be solid and able. If something went wrong – god forbid, if they lost a pilot, for example, due to whatever – anybody else in the crew could step in and take their place. All of us are expendable, to some extent. I know the research that needs to be done when we reach the anomaly, but if I were to die, Tomas would be able to talk somebody else through it.
They all watch me push away from the bed, even as I squint through the brightness. I flail in the lack of gravity, somehow even less graceful than I was on NISS. Inna takes my hand and pulls me to one side, then puts it onto one of the rails that runs along the side of the room. She folds my fingers over it for me, and then puts her own over mine, putting pressure on it. The confidence of her, telling me that all of this will be all right.
‘Hold on,’ she says. I clutch onto the rail, and look at my hand, to focus myself. I can’t tell if the white is my knuckles or the residue of the spots in my eyes, but it distracts me and I let go. I haven’t got control, and I lose my breathing. I feel a hand on my shoulder: Hikaru, steadying me. He smiles.
‘Dr Hyvönen,’ he says. ‘You’re okay. It’s just a bit of residual whatever. Can’t have you ruined before we’ve even begun.’ I cling to him, and I try to make the feeling in my gut die down; I try to think of anything but how easy it would be to spin here, and how tired I am, and the whiteness behind my eyes, which doesn’t seem to leaving me no matter how many times I blink, no matter how many times I shut my lids and try to picture nothing but darkness.
Hikaru and Tobi prepare the cockpit. They sit down and they check the pathfinder, the life-support systems, the drag. One of them is to stay here at all times, to ensure that nothing changes suddenly. We are to travel to, and then stop outside, the anomaly, as best we understand it, and take measurements and readings, conduct all of our tests from there. It takes a long time to stop this ship as well: and the force to do it is just as strong as the force it took to get it going. We have to have our wits about us. As they are preparing, they change the cockpit screens to show us behind the ship; and they call us over, both of them smiling. There is the Earth: spinning in the distance, the size of the smallest coin, and getting smaller and smaller as we watch it, as we are moving away from it so quickly that it would be unbelievable if Tomas and I hadn’t designed it to be so.
I feel sick, unbelievably sick. Inna takes me to one side and clips me to the safety bars, and she gives me pills to swallow down that will settle my stomach, she says. I know what they do: they settle nothing. Instead, they suppress the brain’s ability to feel the stomach churning. I don’t say anything, because this is her job. I have no desire to undermine her. The rest of the crew start their checks: Tobi and Hikaru running through every possible fault-point, calling out features of the craft and running analysis on those systems, synchronizing the computers with the ship itself, checking the batteries, reporting back to Tomas to ensure parity of results. Wallace goes off down the corridor, towards the engine rooms, to check efficiency there, to ensure that all readings there are correct; Inna leaves me, patting me on the knee, and then goes round one by one, looking at the crew’s eyes, to make sure that there are no burst blood vessels (or, at least, that’s what she says, as she looks for signs of stroke or aneurysm); and when he’s been checked and okayed, Lennox pulls himself in front of me, smiling.
‘You want me to start doing something?’ he asks. His accent is bizarre. France by way of Jamaica, delivered with the drive of having studied in London. A proper mélange of an accent. We are kindred spirits in that, if nothing else. ‘I’ll call up exactly where we are.’
‘We know where we are,’ I say. The computer does all of that for us. We’re useless until we get to the anomaly itself.
‘I can set us up. Set your workstation up. Start pinging the anomaly.’
‘Fine,’ I say.
‘You want to check my settings before I begin?’
‘I trust you,’ I tell him, regardless of whether I do or not.
‘Okay.’ He pushes backwards, and he somersaults off. He’s graceful in a way that I never will be. ‘Listen, I just wanted to say: thanks for this opportunity, yeah?’ That seems an understatement, but it’s not. He’s humble. He’s a good kid, I suppose. I am too judgmental of ambition. He calls up a screen and starts the procedures, all of which log everything we’re going to be looking at. While we’re out here, we can do work that would, from Earth, take months. Maybe even years. He checks in with Tomas, and I hear them begin the work together. This is a partnership spread over thousands of miles, over space and time. When Lennox is going, Tomas asks to speak to me. Lennox channels it through to the station nearest me.
‘Is everything okay up there?’ Tomas asks. The speakers are focused and driven; and voice doesn’t carry, not here. Only I can hear him.
‘It’s fine,’ I say. I pause.
‘And you’re okay?’
‘I’m queasy,’ I say. ‘It happens.’
‘Everything looks wonderful from down here. Perfect. I’d say that this has been a triumph, wouldn’t you?’ He sounds thrilled. I can hear the grin in his voice – big, toothy grin, bending his cheeks, stretching and bending his birthmark. A clap of his hands together. ‘So now we’ve all got a job to do.’
‘Yes,’ I say. I don’t say anything else, and his pause is longer, as if he’s waiting for me to.
‘I’m going to get some sleep. Go home; it’s been a long day. Simpson is taking the post here now, okay? You need anything, you call him.’
‘Sure,’ I say, but he knows that I won’t. I can handle anything that comes up. And then he’s gone, and I’m alone again. I’m incredibly tired as well; hearing him saying it does something to me, like the involuntary contagion of a yawn. I shut my eyes, still floating there. Why can I sleep now? Why is it that when I am needed I could drift off and allow myself to be gone? Tobi shouts that she is hungry: I am startled awake. I don’t know if I could eat, not feeling like this.
‘Our first meal,’ she says. ‘Feels like we should have some sort of ceremony.’ They all float to the table, and I unclip myself. I have to join them, to stress my leadership, my skill here. I need their respect; Tomas and I long debated the importance of respect amongst a crew. I cling to the rail and I pull myself along towards the central dais table. I can feel them staring at me. They are still humouring me, because grace is something innate, that cannot be taught, but I know that I will
have to get used to this. I will have to become better at it, in these confined quarters. On the NISS it was one thing; here, I may even have to go outside the ship, and I need to know that I am capable of that. The table divides the central part of the room. The shape, the construct of the room, is a triple loop, like an infinity symbol doubled-up: three circular rooms on top of each other. The cockpit, the table, the beds: all round. Tomas read books on psychology during the interior design stage of the project, and he read that circular rooms could help to offer an artificial sense of camaraderie. No nooks or crannies to hide in. That’s why the beds can be darkened and made private: in case we need alone time. There’s some wiggle room, but not much. The table has magnets for us to attach our suits to, like everything else. This wasn’t our invention. The suits have ten or so of the magnets, heavy duty, and every fixture and fitting in the ship has the other part. You let the two or so of them meet and voilà, you aren’t going anywhere. ‘Somebody should say something,’ Tobi reiterates. We all wait as Wallace comes back down the corridor and sits himself down.
‘Everything’s fine back there,’ he says. He calls down to Simpson, on the ground. ‘Temperatures exactly how they should be, working at 97 per cent efficiency. Batteries on 98 per cent.’ Better than fine, even: within our optimum parameters.’
