The Echo (31 page)

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 things. 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.

Tomas messages me as I am trying to sleep.

‘I wanted to see if you are still there,’ he says.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think that you are less than real. I can’t believe this.’

‘You left me for dead,’ I say. He is silent. ‘Don’t you have anything to say?’ I ask him.

‘I don’t know,’ he says.

‘You could apologize,’ I tell him.

‘No I couldn’t,’ he says. The connection severs.

I try and work out where Tomas could be. This seems like a sensible way to spend my time: exercising my brain. Putting anything I have up here to good use. This was always my flaw, I think. I could never just stop and be. Tomas was able to do everything, to multitask, to do his dating and his fucking and his work and somehow get it all right. He was hampered: he was the imperfect one, the one who was neglected when I was a miracle. He had the birthmark: I was physically perfect. But then, he excelled and I did not. I was the one whom they did tests on when we were children, who had the extra time to do his exams. He is no less intelligent, they said. He just needs more care. I was the one whom Tomas had to look after. Everything about us leads to this: him as my salvation, and still I know he is lying to me. He has always lied, because it’s easier for him. And why should I trust him, I want to know. I want to ask him, but the connection is dead, so I plot his route instead. I try to see where he could have left from and where he could be now, if I make educated assumptions concerning my own trajectory. Assuming he can see me, and it’s just me that cannot see him. Assuming that he is here to rescue me, and not luring me deeper into this thing for his precious fucking research. Nothing but assumptions. He had a thing he used to say about that, a pithy little joke that he threw out to embarrass me when I used the word. When we were researching, I used it a lot. So much of science is based on assumptions. We assumed that the anomaly would be something we could just read from, something benign and yet explainable. I can hear his pith in my mind, rolling around.

He would say, We should have researched more.

After a day of working on it, I cannot fathom where he can be. The estimations of the anomaly are huge and all-encompassing, and I put a pin into the map to represent where we could end up, based on trajectory and speed and assuming that I travel at normal parameters inside this thing. Assuming I burn fuel normally and that the drag – and therefore my speed – is constant. He can’t be there, because I can’t work out how he would reach that point. I can’t see how, from earth, in the time that he had; flying around it, riding its curvature, coming in from the rear. I imagine it as many ways as I am capable of doing and I simply cannot see it. There is something about this that all feels too inevitable.

So I try options: that maybe he left before he said, that we were talking from somewhere closer, and he was lying to me; that he is lying now, but somehow has managed to find a way to communicate with me from Earth, even though the lag is less; that I have been here for longer than I thought. The last one burns. It would mean that I have died somehow, and am part of a cycle. I wouldn’t even realize, would I? I would be stuck here, somehow in this loop, and he might have been out here for months looking for me. Maybe years. I have thought about how they work: some consideration about what makes them begin, what defines them. I touch myself, feel my body, as if that might give me a sign. Maybe I have been here for more time than I realize, and he has found a way out. Maybe we are different ages; brothers now, no longer twins. No longer even close to identical. We wear different skins entirely.

It nags at me. I cannot fathom him lying to me, not like this; though it explains so much. It explains the hesitation in his voice, the trepidation, the fear. What if I was in a loop and he has found a way to break it? What if they are trying to talk me out of the anomaly without me dying, undoing all their good work? I try to work out the fastest Tomas could get to the point he claims, if he slept the whole way, if they had somehow added fuel tanks, replaced life-support systems with backup fuel, made the ship more cramped. Maybe only brought a crew of three, say, to run it. A skeleton staff. It’s still days and days out. Maybe he’s telling me his projected time? Maybe the point at which we will coalesce?

I message him. I am determined to ask him. I message over and over, nagging him, not even saying anything but his name, calling into the darkness. Eventually he answers, after I don’t even know how long.

‘What do you want?’ he asks.

‘Where are you?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. He barely sounds like the same man. He sounds broken, more broken than I am, even. Not like a man who is on a rescue.

‘You said that I was twelve days away from seeing you. Now it’s only seven.’

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘So how are you that far into space so quickly? How did you find the other edge of the anomaly?’