The Echo (12 page)

My brother’s full and complete name was printed first on our initial funding pitch: Tomas Johannes Hyvönen, named after both grandfather and great-grandfather, the two most important male names in my mother’s life, both claimed and consumed before I even squeezed my way out of her. He was the one with the previous positive funding experience; it was easiest to go with what you know, I granted him that. Dr Tomas and Dr Mirakel, my full name because the funding committees needed to be able to look us up. (He said once, Why not change your name? Legally, pick a new one that sounds better. This was after our mother had died, and I said, It seems wrong. This is the only part that’s left, and she loved it. So it stays. He even suggested alternatives. John. James. Boring biblical names, dull names. Is it better to be a joke than to be staid?) So after that his was the name that the board wrote to, to tell him of our successful pitch. He had the letter arrive at his house, read it before me, and he called me up and sent a scan of it across for me to look at. He framed it, the original, and hung it in his office. That was the precedent: they called him when they had issues, and he was the first port of call for interviews and articles. In photographs, he was placed in front, because the birth mark – a crutch in a time where genetics couldn’t be modified willy-nilly, but now, for us, something to flaunt, a statement – singled him out and sold issues of magazines and newspapers. It made him a spokesman, and I his parrot, sitting behind his shoulder, repeating that which he had already said. One interview for a television show, as we headed towards the process where we would start to pick the crew, was taken by him alone. They explained that there wasn’t enough room on the sofa – next to the presenters and the other guests – for two. He spoke about the mission in singular absolutes – I, Me, Mine – and then tasted food designed to be eaten in space, freeze-dried but created by a celebrity chef, and then he laughed at a comedian who joked about motorways and the inherent dangers of them versus space travel. I watched from the green room, on a small monitor, and I ate biscuits and drank weak lemon tea.

And when we went on television to announce the date of the launch, it was Tomas who spoke. He told them and he took the applause, and I sat quietly by his side. Scalded, almost.

I take another stim and miss another sleep, which is fine, because it means I do not have to worry: about sleep, or the day to come, or anything. Instead I sit in the lab and watch the ship get clearer and clearer. It stops again, only briefly this time, and then continues on its way. I don’t speak to Tomas, even though I hear him talking to the rest of the crew as they wake up. I don’t even bother to eavesdrop, because it’s immaterial what they’re saying. Tobi says it’s only another twenty-four hours until we’re close enough to see the ship better. Now, it’s the size of a fingernail. By then it might well be the size of a fist.

Inna tells me that I should sleep, or rest. She stands in the doorway. She has mastered, in her graceful ways of movement, a manoeuvre where she touches the floor with the tips of her feet, letting them drag slightly along the plastic as she moves. From behind it looks as though she’s balancing on them, creeping on tiptoes so pointed that they suggest a ballerina who has managed to break the laws of physics. Now she floats in front of me. I try to pay attention to her, but the ship is still there.

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘You must have been awake for hours.’

‘I won’t be much longer,’ I say. I remember my dream again; and her tattoo. ‘I have work to do. Not too much. I’ll sleep soon.’

‘Or you’ll sleep now,’ she says. ‘Do I have to come over there and force you?’ I don’t answer, or move. She sighs and sinks towards me. ‘Mirakel, you have to sleep. We need you at your best.’

‘You used my full name,’ I say.

‘I shouldn’t?’

‘No,’ I say. I do not say: it forces people to take me less seriously. They mistake me for a fool. They think that I am temporary, or somehow worthless. They treat me as a child, as somebody that needs their assistance. Mirakel is a different person: I left him when I stopped being a child. ‘I prefer Mira, honestly.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. She reaches out for me, and she takes my arm, holding my hand at the wrist.

‘It’s no matter.’

‘But my point stands,’ she says. ‘I am tired. You are tired. We are all tired. Being here, it’s one of the most tiring things you can do. Your body isn’t meant for this, and you have to deal with it properly. So, sleep, and then tomorrow you’ll do some exercise.’ I unclip myself and allow her to pull me away from the console, and she pushes off the wall and into the corridor, putting her weight into it. It’s easier this way. To let her lead. Her hand is warm. Here, we keep the air cool. You don’t want to get hot here, no sweat peeling itself off your forehead into globules that drift and threaten to collide with others. Far better to be nice and cool. But her hand is still so warm, warmer than I’m used to. I don’t remark on it, but it’s nice. She takes me down the corridor and to the living quarters, where the others ready themselves for bed. She doesn’t know about the stim I took only a few hours ago. She grabs the lid of my bed and grips it, as if she is holding it open for me. As if the entire apparatus isn’t automated. ‘Okay,’ she says. She watches me climb in and strap myself down, and then she smiles and shuts the lid to the bed and I lie there in the dark and don’t sleep. I listen as much as I can, through the seal, and the others gradually shut their own beds. The one next to me, Inna’s, I listen for that seal, and as soon as it hisses I count to a hundred – eyes pinned open by the stims, no chance of me accidentally drifting anywhere in this thing – and then crack the lid. The ship is quiet; Tobi is in the cockpit. I don’t say anything to her. It is none of her business how much I sleep.

I watch the
Ishiguro
on the screens in the lab. It moves. It gets larger, slowly, bit by bit, as if it is swelling.

Because I never leave its side, or because I am here almost the entire time, there is no danger of me missing the developments. Now, I see it stop again: once more it slowly grinds to a halt. I imagine them inside: their artificial gravity generator doing its work, ruining the experience of this: making them feel as if they are on a train, travelling forward on a path, no bumps or variation. I don’t know if I am imagining them now or then: what they would be like now, twenty years after the fact. I have so many questions for them. I want to know what they have seen. I want to know what happened. I want to know why they have not made it home. In my worst daydreams, the starting and stopping is a malfunction of the computers, degraded and useless; and the ship is full of their corpses; and there are no answers to be gained from this, only a husk of metal that doesn’t belong out here. We have the image stretched as large as we can, but it’s not enough. I want more. I lean in, so close that the vapours of the holo are almost overpowering, but it’s what I need to do. I need to see this. I can see the plating, and I can see the engines, and I can almost see details in them, that’s how close we are. It is deceptive: we are still four days away. Through the use of the bounce, we have a camera so powerful and important that we can almost see into the future, and here I am, watching a ship from the past, stopped still in the expanse.

Then I see it: something else. A speck, a dot, circling the ship. Only a few pixels, even at this resolution. It is small and it is white, and it seems to float and then cling to the side of the
Ishiguro
, and I can only just make it out: arms and legs and the solid lump of a body holding them all together.

‘There’s somebody alive out there,’ I tell Tomas. I send the message across space to him, but I don’t leave the channel open to wait for a reply, and he doesn’t try to instigate one. I heave myself to the living quarters and hammer my fists on the lid of Lennox’s bed, and Wallace’s, and they all wake up one by one, an hour before they’re meant to. I’m telling Tobi what I found as they blearily join the conversation, and I have to repeat myself four or five times, over and over, but I never get tired to saying it. ‘Come on,’ I say, and I lead them, like the Pied Piper, to the observation lab.

We watch him, her, it, whatever, dance around the outside of the ship. It’s brief. I record it, and then we watch it again: somebody is outside the ship, still alive, and then they get back into the ship and the engines start, and they move off.

We don’t talk, any of us. We don’t know what this means. We are travelling as fast as we can.

‘It has to be Dr Singer,’ Tomas tells me later that day. We’re both sitting in our respective labs as everybody else readies themselves for the evening: whether that means home and families for those around him; bleached-white protein bars and idle speculation for mine. He’s drinking, I can tell. There’s a slur in his voice, a slur that I absolutely recognize. I do not drink, not really, because I cannot stand the lack of control. I cannot stand feeling that loose. I think that that is why Tomas likes it. He will be there, drink in hand, fashioned from the ingredients that he keeps in his desk, the different bottles. He has those little plastic sticks to mix the drinks. Maybe he is even smoking a cigarette. A period costume for performing this very particular type of science. ‘He’s the only one who would even think of heading outside by himself, I suspect.’

‘Why aren’t they still sending results?’

‘It must be the anomaly,’ he says, as if that’s enough to excuse and explain anything that doesn’t make sense. We haven’t asked each other how Dr Singer would have survived this long; what he must have done to have found food, to have eked out an existence out here. It seems almost gauche. Soon he can tell us those things himself. ‘I’m going home,’ Tomas tells me. He pauses, then: ‘Good work today, Mira.’ Patting me on the head.

‘Go back to your baker,’ I say. I try to make it sound light-hearted. He laughs, so I think it worked.

‘Goodnight, Baby Brother,’ he says. I hear the click of his severing the connection. I feel uneasy: we never say goodnight. We never say goodbye.

I pull the image back from the
Ishiguro
, spin it, examine other parts of the anomaly. Not that we have forgotten it, but we have been preoccupied. The pings are still drawing the outline, and there is a shape forming: here, with the orange trace lines, it is almost the fruit of the same name, this shape, nearly round. Not perfect edges. They will be discovered, as the pings keep being sent and the results keep being recorded. There is nothing as black as the anomaly. No stars; no planets in the long distance, even though they should be there, but they’re hidden behind the sheet of blackness; nothing apart from the
Ishiguro
, now, and lumps of rock in other quadrants, floating as if they’re caught in a tide. I pull the camera to the edges of the anomaly, where it looks like the aurora borealis, folds and lines of colour along the rim. I trace the line of the thing as best I can: I overlay the pings, and I stare at it. ‘What are you?’ I ask it. I watch it for hours more. When I start to falter, during the night, I take another stim. The next thing I know, I’ve been looking at it all night; and then Inna is behind me, hand on my shoulder, asking me how much sleep I had, but I do not answer. She says that they’re all going to eat breakfast together. She wants me to be a part of this.

‘Come on,’ she says.

Soon the
Ishiguro
is bigger still: a whole hand with fingers splayed. By the start of the next day it’s like a remote-control toy spaceship, floating across the room. It stops and we marvel at it. Even with the anomaly, this is the most impressive thing here: we’re not strangers, and we’re not even alone out here any more.

Tomas concentrates on the anomaly. We spoke about it and agreed: he would do the research on the thing that doesn’t change, that is immutable, and I would deal with the ship. With the lag, he is now thirty seconds behind, and he cannot see the picture as well as we can. Besides which, I am happy with that arrangement. The
Ishiguro
being here is unexplainable, and it might be inspiring, or important. The anomaly is almost a trick of the light that can barely be described as existing, if our readings are correct; the
Ishiguro
is solid, real, tangible, a picture of human triumph and failure both. It is a capsule of us as a people. When the Indian launch failed, when the ship collapsed out of orbit, the world knew that it was human failure. The crew’s deaths were caused by their own desire to get into space, a rush and a push to prove themselves. When the
Ishiguro
went missing, however, it was something else entirely. It was man losing to nature: science failing. But I can prove something else, something different. I can give it an ending where science wins: because here is the ship, decades later, still working, still going. Inside it, a man who will surely have discovered something; because, otherwise, why would he still be here? Why would he not have come home?

It stops more frequently as we get closer. Once a day, maybe. I wonder why, and I picture Dr Singer – Gerhardt, Guy, the great discoverer who almost never was, lost to everything and space and nothing – taking his readings still. A scientist to the very end. What has he found? To have stayed out here this long, riding in the darkness occupied by this anomaly, it must be something truly incredible. The energy used to stop and start, with their utterly fallible, near-broken systems. He found the anomaly in the first instance, so many years ago, back when it was only a speck of nothing in the distance, a vague blur, thought to be something else entirely; and that glory can be his. (If, indeed, it is a glory. We scientists are notable for finding fascination in things that the layman may find tedious. The public, they can relish his return, the conquering hero; we in the science community can relish the results, the numbers, the facts that he will bring with him.)

I have no imagination, I have always been told. I have always struggled to picture that which doesn’t exist: instead, bloody-minded focus, a stubborn singularity in my mind. But this mission, it has done something to me: I am imagining, I think. I think of my dream of Inna, when I never dream like that; and how maybe it was somehow a catalyst. And Dr Singer now, dreaming of what he might be: it isn’t real, not yet, but I desperately want it to be so.