The Echo (26 page)

When I’m done with Hikaru and Inna and Easton I find myself alone. I think about where we are, and how I could have escaped this. But I am a coward, or sensible. Too sensible, maybe. I’m alive, I think. I
assume
. At least I have that. I’m destined to stay alive until I am no longer alive, and then I’ll come back. I contemplate Easton, and how he is here. How he was there twice, and what that must have meant. Something was wrong with his time, but maybe something different to ours. Inna died and then came back, but what if we had left her? What part did we play in her cycle? The cycles, the loops, the lives, they are seemingly random in length. There are no answers: it is as if we are being played with. I wonder when the loop began for him. They went far deeper into space than we did, because that was where the anomaly was then. When did their cycle start? Or was it only Easton’s cycle? Were the rest of them just passengers, de facto parts of it, destined to be as they were until he reached his end?

‘Tomas?’ I ask. I wonder if it even matters that there is no answer. We nurse Easton back to health and maybe we will have one. Maybe then we can get closure. Or we make a closed experiment of this: a test that can provide a definitive answer. I think about writing myself a note, scrawling it onto one of the boards in the lab about what I am going to do, and then lifting a razor to my neck and sliding it through the skin, through the arteries and veins. Feeling them pop under the weight of the blade, and watching the blood arc out. I wonder how long it would take me to start a new cycle; and when I came back, if I would still feel the pain. If the blood would remain. When I would start the cycle: in this room, with razor in hand? Partway into the slice? Or before I even contemplated it? Before I had even written the note to myself?

Before this mission even began?

The others are antsy, staying where we are, leaving gravity switched on. Hikaru looks at the battery and worries, because the charge loses every second that we sit still. He questions whether the ship’s batteries will still work the same inside the anomaly; so we might end up with this being our last. We should save it for life-support systems: on their own, what we have left could sustain the four of us for nearly a month, that’s how efficiently they run. I tell him that I want to talk to Easton before we switch it off.

He is lying on the floor, head down. He is perfectly still, and his hands are splayed, flat on the floor. His fingers are like nothing I’ve ever seen: pink silk draped over broken twigs. He can’t bend them properly, they’re too gnarled. He lies here because of the gravity. Because it’s so hard for him to lift his head. His muscles can’t cope with it, and they’re relaxing. I ask him questions and he doesn’t answer them. It feels pointless.

‘I’m letting go,’ he says as I stand up to leave, to tell Hikaru to remove gravity. He’s barely audible, so I lean in, and he repeats it.

‘Of what?’ I ask, because I feel like I should. He doesn’t answer. He shuts his eyes. ‘Are you even glad that we saved you?’ I ask, but of course there is no answer. ‘We are about to lose gravity,’ I say, and then we do. I watch him float upwards, and he hangs there in the middle of the airlock, weightless and gone, entirely limp, like a rag doll with no spine to give it structure.

I pick a blister pack of stims from the medical cupboard and pop one out. I can stop now, I tell myself. We’re swallowed, deep in the belly of the whale. Inna comes to me as I hold the pill in my hands.

‘He’s sick,’ she says.

‘I know.’

‘What do you want to do about him?’

‘Can we make him better?’ I ask.

‘I don’t think so,’ she replies. ‘If we had a hospital, maybe. Nutrient drips. Years of therapy.’ She means both kinds. ‘Here, I don’t think we can.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Then we make it as easy for him as possible. He probably deserves that.’ I try and sound convincing. We don’t know anything about him. He might have mutinied and killed his crew for all we know. Somehow he survived and they did not: and somehow he has aged, and they are all just a part of his cycle. We can’t explain it: I dread to think what will happen to us out here now. If one of us will become him, outliving the others, somehow going around and around at a completely different pace, in a completely different loop.

‘I’m scared,’ she says. ‘Of what might happen now.’

‘I know,’ I say. She floats up to me and puts a hand on my leg, and I see her fingernails, the chipped nail-polish on them. That she made a token effort before and I didn’t notice it. I wonder if it was done for me, before. I hope that it was. She squeezes my arm.

‘You didn’t stand up for us,’ she says. ‘And you didn’t come to me.’

‘I thought that it was the best thing to do,’ I tell her. It is not a lie, one way or another. ‘I wanted to make sure that we got home.’

‘We still could now. We could find a way.’

‘Yes,’ I say. I think, Lies are no foundation for the start of a relationship. That is what this feels like.

‘This doesn’t stop. We were here to find out more about the anomaly, weren’t we?’ She looks hopeful. That my answer will be the truth she’s believed.

‘Always,’ I say.

‘So that will not change now. Now we simply have a better point of view.’ She bends in towards me, and I think that this could be when it changes. For a second I am not here: I am anywhere else. I have forgotten our location, our crisis, our pains. I have forgotten the deaths we have suffered and the calamity. I have forgotten the
Ishiguro
and Tomas back at home and everything else. She kisses me on the cheek, on the hairs that have grown there, so close to my mouth. And she whispers, into that skin there, that she forgives me. ‘All we have left is the reality of the now,’ she says. ‘We shouldn’t sacrifice that. We shouldn’t lose it.’

I think, I have nothing to be forgiven for. But I cannot say that to her, because this, to her, is all, and she has given it to me. I let the pill drop from my hand, and I put the blister pack back. I do not need them now.

My mother, before she died, was in a hospital. I visited her with Tomas one Saturday when we were close to the final stages of our pitch for the UNSA contract. We were busy and tired and lost, and, to us, this was another blip. She had been in and out of the hospital for years, a seemingly perpetual cycle of treatment and recovery, and each time was given what amounted to an all-clear. Then, two months later, something would be found. It was always a step ahead of her, and of us. (Her then partner told us that if we had put half the effort into curing her that we put into our adventures – his word – we could have saved her. He said, Think of the good you could have done. He spat on Tomas’ shoes, and we said, Well, you left her, just as she was sick. We were all guilty, even though Tomas said that he was not.) This time, she was taken in as an emergency. We flew across from the US, where we were preparing for a meeting with important men who could add funding to the proposal. Part of the process was showing the UNSA that you could play the game, and it was crucial. Going in without some base funding would have been fatal to us.

So we flew over on the Saturday morning, working on the flight, and we sat with her all day. She did look sick, we told her. Not that we thought what she had was hyperchondriacal, but that she often put a brave face on for us. We asked her what the doctors had said. She said that they didn’t know what they were talking about, and we said, Okay, but what did they say? They had said that it was in her spleen, now, and her stomach, and her bowel. They would have to tear most of her out, and what would they be leaving? (I distinctly remember picturing her as one of those dissected mannequins that they used in biology class, with the pregnant baby in: you take the baby out and there are all the organs, removable one by one, carefully stacked so that they don’t just tumble out and leave the woman hollow.) So we sat with her, and we queued up movies on the television that we knew she loved, and we just sat and watched them.

She asked us how it was going with the project (which is what she called the mission, as if we were still in school). It’s going well, we said. We’re doing our best. That’s all you can ask, she told us. She said, I’m in a lot of pain. So we upped her morphine, just that second, because we wanted to help. She said, You could name something after me, couldn’t you? Of course we could, I told her. Tomas said, We could name a star, but I didn’t want that. You can buy that from the internet, I said. Anybody can be named after a star. We’ll pick something else, I told her, and for a second I was best child, again.

She said, Give me more morphine. So we did, because she was in pain, and who could bear to see that? We worried about if she would die when we left, when we were in another country entirely, and couldn’t make it back to see her. But it was immaterial. She asked us to up her morphine and we did, and again. She died in the night, that night, and I said to Tomas, Well, we name the ship after her. That’s the thing that will be remembered in the history books. Remembered, preserved in a museum: the story of us and our mother, alive for eternity, having been to the stars and back.

I tell Hikaru and Inna and Easton that I am going to sleep. I climb into my bed, resisting the urge to stay awake; to find the stims and take them. They are not addictive, but maybe that feeling is, I reason: the feeling of being awake, of having yourself fully there. I undress as much as I feel comfortable, knowing that Inna and Hikaru are there. Especially Inna. I wonder if I have let myself go more: if the thinness in my body makes me even less physically appealing. They say that they’re staying awake to watch over Easton, so I don’t need to worry about it. I shut my eyes, in the darkness of that bed, and I talk to myself. I tell myself all that has happened to me, and I think of Tomas, and I think of Inna. I think that I sleep, but I can feel myself as if I am awake. I wonder if the stims have damaged me. I wonder if it’s possible to ruin the part of you that sleeps, and rests, and recovers.

When I wake up, they are all asleep. I am alone. I look at Easton, curled up, floating in the middle of the airlock; and then the other beds, their screens all dimmed. I clip myself to a rail and watch them, and I ask for my brother, over the intercom, but there’s no answer. I do not know if this is because he can’t hear me at all, now. There’s nothing when I click through to Earth. I send a message for him, telling him what happened, in case he doesn’t know. Maybe he will want to save me. I beg him to: I say, I cannot be alone up here without you. Have I ever needed him like this before?

I notice that Inna’s bed is open, and she is watching me. She has seen I don’t know how much of me talking to Tomas, snivelling and crying. She doesn’t judge; instead, she pushes out of her bed and towards me, and she opens her arms wide and envelops me. She is comforting: her skin is warm against mine.

‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘This is okay, you know.’

‘I do not know who I am,’ I say. ‘Without him, I don’t even know what I can be.’ Her hands rub my back, and they find their way to my hair, and I cry onto her vest, soaking her shoulder. The tears peel away, and I notice them, and I think, I have seen that before. Everything has a part to play in my memory of this.

‘We only have ourselves,’ Inna says. She moves back, and she raises her shirt, only above her belly, to show me more of the tattoo. She exposes the bottom half of the bird that starts at her shoulder. In its claws it carries a word, as if it were a dead mouse. Pak, it says. It is so dark, but now I can see surgery scars with my thumbs, and the tattoo following them: the lines of the bird, loose and fluid, along the flat, crease-free skin that shows where her body once failed her. I can see all of her written out in the tattoo. She has had the darkness inside her, destroying her organs, just as my mother did. I wonder how much of her has been taken. Life has a way of making this happen. Some would call it fate. ‘We are all we are left with,’ she says. She covers herself again, and she holds me once again. For a brief moment I do not know which of us needs this more; but that moment passes.

We hear the scream as we’re asleep: standing with each other, magnetized to the rail, in some comforting embrace. When I wake up, it’s to look into her face, and there’s a second before I hear the scream again. We detach and push towards it. She is faster than me, through the doorway first and into the corridor. It is Hikaru’s voice, the scream: wet and pained and like a full-stop. He is on the floor, only a few inches above the ground, his body in the pose of a kneel, of praying, a genuflection; and there is a jagged shard of plastic in his neck, blood thudding out in baubles of thick red, dabbing the walls in dragged-out smears. He pulls the shard out and immediately lets go of it, and it looks as though he is doing it in slow motion. It floats in front of his eyes, taunting him. Inside the airlock, the journalist Cormac Easton: his hands red with Hikaru’s blood. The computer panel outside the door has been activated: somebody was trying to do something with it. I wait at the back, shocked and scared and so ineffectual. Inna rushes to Hikaru’s drifting body and screams at the phantom inside the airlock.

‘You monster,’ she says. ‘Why would you do this? What did he ever do to you?’ She’s angry, and it’s a gut reaction: she reaches for the button to lock the airlock, to trap Easton in. I am in the doorway, and I am slow to react. He is faster. Easton is used to this: he is somehow at one with the lack of gravity, a fish thrown back into the water. He shoots forward, his arm out, and he takes the shard, and he kicks off the floor. He lashes out with it again. Not a stab, this time, but a swipe. The tip scratches across her neck. It is a scratch at first, and I am glad that he missed, that he was ineffective; and then her neck opens up, a second mouth lower down, lipless and slowly gaping as she gags. Her blood joins Hikaru’s as her hand hits the panel, the right button by some fluke of chance, to close the airlock and seal it. It hisses shut, driven into Cormac’s frail body, and I hear the cracks of his bones as he is knocked backwards. He is trapped inside, no longer a threat, and I can move now: my faculties back, freed from self-imposed rigidity. I rush to Inna to see what I can do to help. Hikaru is already too far gone. It’s pointless, thinking that I might save him. But Inna: her injury is fresher. I pick her up in my arms, draping her arms over my shoulders, and I try to walk-swim back towards the living area with her. Her blood soaks into my clothes, which is good, because this way it isn’t flooding out, soaking the rest of the ship; and I finally reach the table that we ate from, or sat at while we ate, and I lie her on it. I open the medical supplies cupboard, no real idea what I am doing, and I take gauze and sealant. I know to make injections with the sealant, to stem the flow of blood, and when I have done them I try to stop the blood by pressing the gauze down. He neck feels loose under my hands: as if it is slipping as I press on it. I apply pressure regardless. I remember that being something that I should do.