Echo Boy (37 page)

‘Why was he so evil?’ she said quietly. ‘Uncle Alex, I mean. I don’t think my dad had any idea.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe you will find out one day. Humans seem very complicated.’

‘Part of me thinks it’s best not to know. I just hope Dad never knew, either . . . I worry that something happened when they were kids . . . Something I’ll never know about.’

‘Please, Audrey, stop worrying. That’s the past. We have no control over that. But the future is ours . . .’

‘Yeah,’ she said sleepily. ‘The future is ours . . .’

Eventually she could fight it no longer. She fell asleep on my shoulder. Her breathing slowed to ten breaths per minute. There was a female Echo opposite me who observed this. She had a shaven head and was designed for strength. I smiled at her. ‘She missed her last recharge,’ I explained, on Audrey’s behalf.

Audrey had spoken to me about her doubts before we got on the shuttle, back at the spaceport. She was worried that, even with her new smooth skin, she didn’t look good enough.

‘Even old, wrinkly Echos are old and wrinkly in a perfect way,’ she said. ‘They never quite look human.’

She was worried that she was imperfect, even by human standards. She talked about her shoulders and her nose and the way she walked. I began to realize that humans have a very distorted view of themselves, as nothing she said about her appearance matched the reality.

Most of the other Echos were on their way to manual labour jobs,
judging from their size (thirty were in fact exactly the same model – of a large male with a mohawk, and I was pretty sure I was the only prototype among them). When I first got on the vessel, I was startled to find 15 there, taking his seat opposite me but further along. Only of course, it wasn’t 15. Or rather, it was one of probably 5,000 15s in the world.

I had to protect Audrey, and she had to protect me.

Neither of us now belonged with those we were meant to be part of. We were going to have to be a world unto ourselves, a universe of two, and that was good. Well, it was infinitely better than being a universe of one.

She was everything.

She was hope and fear and love and pain.

She was as alive as anyone had ever been alive. And being alive meant possibility and uncertainty. Life was irrational, and irrationality could never be mapped. So in each life – each true life – there were lots of other lives branching out, like the garden of forking paths I had once read about. And loving someone was a process of helping that person find the best of those possible lives, and helping them live it.

She carried on sleeping.

I no longer saw Earth out of the window now. It was just the deep darkness of space, punctured by brilliant white stars. Distant suns, the nearest of which I knew was 4.2421 light years away. Yet we could see them. My mind wandered, the way Echo minds weren’t supposed to. Light was like hope, I thought. It took a long time to get there, but it always got there in the end, if you let it keep going.

And then it came into view.

Our destination, New Hope Colony.

A vast dome, next to the dark basalt of the Sea of Tranquillity,
covering a surface area of 938 square kilometres. Lights twinkled; streets crisscrossed in neat geometric patterns, and were filled with cheaply made buildings; holo-ads glowed; and the magrails were only half complete.

As we sank down towards the spaceport (2.7 kilometres outside the dome, but connected via a long transparent tunnel full of slow-moving moon traffic), I caught sight of the northern suburb of Aldrin, the place where we were going to live. It was the darkest part, badly lit and with many still-unoccupied homes. Sixty-eight per cent unoccupied. (Implanted information filled my mind every time we came to a new place. And there were few places that were newer than Aldrin, or even New Hope.) It shouldn’t have looked very promising, and it couldn’t have been further away from the leafy green streets and mansions of north London, but that’s the funny thing about freedom, and happiness. It doesn’t always look like you expect it to look. But still, I recognized it when I saw it.

I gently nudged Audrey awake. ‘Audrey, we are here now.’

She woke up slowly. Blinked away the sleep from her eyes. For two seconds, I don’t think she knew where she was, or what she had to pretend to be.

‘Where?’ she asked.

And I said a word I had never said before. A word that felt wonderful to say:

‘Home. We are home.’

And Audrey smiled, though as the craft touched the ground there was a slight fear in her eyes, as there must have been in my own. But it wasn’t like the fears we had experienced before. The fears that had nearly overwhelmed us. No, this was just the fear of not knowing what lay in store for us. The fear that came from realizing that the future
couldn’t ever be known, because it contained so many different paths and possibilities. It was the most pleasurable kind of fear, and was coupled with hopeful excitement.

She looked out at that barren grey landscape, towards a smaller dome, in the distance, just inside the dry, dead Sea of Tranquillity. Half a kilometre across. There was what seemed to be grass there, within that dome. Crops. It looked like a farm. They were actually trying to do the impossible: to grow things out of the moon’s lifeless crust.

In a way, that is what we would be trying to do. Not work on a farm exactly – though we wouldn’t rule it out (we wouldn’t rule anything out) – but to create a life out of nothing.

She squeezed my hand. Nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, we were about to step out, into air that felt a lot fresher and purer than the air in the shuttle.

‘This is where we begin,’ I said. ‘Are you ready?’

‘Yes,’ she said as we stepped onto the leviboard. ‘I am ready.’

Matt Haig’s first novel for young readers,
Shadow Forest
, won the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award and the Gold Smarties Award. He is also the author of various adult novels, including the bestsellers
The Last Family in England
,
The Radleys
and
The Humans
. Reviewers have called his writing ‘totally engrossing’, ‘touching, quirky and macabre’ and ‘so surprising and strange that it vaults into a realm all of its own’. His books have been translated into 25 languages. He lives in York.

The Dead Fathers Club

The Possession of Mr Cave

The Last Family in England

The Radleys

The Humans

Shadow Forest

The Runaway Troll

To Be a Cat

After an ‘incident’ one wet Friday night where Professor Andrew Martin
is found walking naked through the streets of Cambridge, he is not
feeling quite himself. Food sickens him. Clothes confound him. Even
his loving wife and teenage son are repulsive to him. He feels lost
amongst a crazy alien species and hates everyone on the planet.
Everyone, that is, except Newton, and he’s a dog.

What could possibly make someone change their mind
about the human race . . . ?

‘Matt Haig’s hilarious novel puts our species on the spot’
GUARDIAN

‘Tremendous . . . Curious Incident meets The Man Who Fell to Earth’
JOANNE HARRIS

‘Wonderfully funny, gripping and inventive’
THE TIMES

‘A laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and
impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin’
JEANETTE WINTERSON

ECHO BOY
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 17250 4

Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Random House Group Company

This ebook edition published 2014

Copyright © Matt Haig, 2014

First Published in Great Britain

Bodley Head 9781782300069 2014

The right of Matt Haig to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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