The Echo
The Echo
James Smythe
The stunning sequel to James Smythe’s critically acclaimed literary sci-fi novel The Explorer.TWENTY YEARS following the spacecraft Ishiguro’s disappearance, humanity is setting its sights on the heavens once more.Under the direction of two of the most brilliant minds science has ever seen – twin brothers Tomas and Mirakel Hyvönen – this space programme has been tasked with one of the most difficult missions in its history: to study what is being called ‘the anomaly’ – a vast blackness of space thought to be responsible for the loss of the Ishiguro.But as the anomaly tests Mira and the rest of the hand-picked crew’s sanity, Tomas will have to use all his ingenuity if he is to save his brother and their mission.
Copyright (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2014
Copyright © James Smythe 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs: © iStockphoto (astronaut). Shutterstock.com (http://www.Shutterstock.com) (background)
James Smythe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007456789
Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007456802
Version: 2014-12-10
Praise for The Anomaly Quartet: (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
‘Utterly gripping and highly original … explodes off the page’
Daily Mail
‘The Explorer has the dreamlike detachment of an Ishiguro novel … reminiscent of a 1970s space movie, where the darkness of the void mirrors the darkness of the human soul’
Financial Times
‘Beautifully written, creepy as hell. The Explorer is as clever in its unravelling as it is breathlessly claustrophobic’
Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls
‘A wonderful examination of coping with loss, time and death’
SFX
Contents
Cover (#ua3f18cbf-2e01-5091-a031-05609e689c4d)
Title Page (#ubb0a166e-cec9-5dd9-b70d-f88c142057e4)
Copyright
Praise
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part Three
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Here’s an exclusive extract from No Harm Can Come to A Good Man
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by James Smythe
About the Publisher
PART ONE (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
The scientist is not the person who gives the right answers; he’s the one who asks the right questions.
– Claude Lévi-Strauss
1 (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
The sense of pressure on us is immense. There is a feeling that if this fails – and if it were to fail it would be because of me and Tomas, and we are both far too acutely aware of that – but that if this fails, we might not try something like this again. I have seen the receipts for this project of ours. Tomas has signed off on them on my behalf, and we have decided that this is an endeavour that we should undertake. The weight of this endeavour falls onto our shoulders: his and mine. We are separated by only thirty minutes, and soon to be hundreds of thousands of miles. It feels like more already: because he is down there, in the comparative safety of his little bunker, dressed in his shirt and drinking his drink and smoking his cigarettes; and I am here, waiting to leave. I still find it hard to believe that I am the one going. We decided it, as with so many things in our life, on a game. The top bunk of our beds? The front seat of our mother’s car? Always on a game, because somehow that made it fair. If he won, he went to space; if I did, I was the lucky one. Maybe part of the reason that we both wanted it so much is only because the other one did.
But here I am. I am the one up here, and I will be the one going out there into the dark. Tomas has safety: of the lab, the bunker, the hotel that sits adjoining; and of a ground underneath his feet that will not rumble and shudder and shake, and that has no danger of tearing itself apart or falling out of the sky. And he has the girlfriend, the nice house, the nice car. In reality, it’s better that I am the brother who came up here. The only goodbye that I had to say was to him. We shook hands, which we have never ever done before.
I came up here with the crew yesterday. One of the things that Tomas and I decided, when we began this process, was that we would launch from the International Space Station. We decreed changes that would need to happen – the changes that transformed it into the New International Space Station, the same as the old but with what amounts to a loft conversion, a conservatory bolted onto the side, the prefix at the start of the name – and they all happened. Every single one. This is, for now, important. We are important. From here, I can see the planet we left. I have put marks on my window with black marker pen, just to check that we and it are moving as we should. But of course we are: how could we not be? And, on the other side, I can see the moon. I can see all of it. Now, here, I see Mare Fecunditatis and Langrenus. I know these features – a lake and a crater, essentially, named by gravitas and a Latin education rather than utility – almost by heart. I have studied them all my life.
I am worried. I cannot remember when I was last not worried, but that makes perfect sense. My mother once said, Man wasn’t meant to go into space. If he was meant to go into space, God would have made us all angels.
I feel better knowing that Tomas is on the ground, though. That he is watching over us. He is rooted, and that’s a nice feeling. If something goes wrong on the trip (which it will not, because we have covered every single eventuality, because we are those sort of people) he will be there to steer us home. He can override the controls, and there might be lag, there might be a delay, but he would get us home. I am comfortable in that knowledge. It makes me feel good; we have always steered each other.
I call him from the computer. It amazes me: how we can speak from here, with this distance between us. I understand the science completely, and yet. Sometimes I forget how rational this all is, and how explainable, and I revel in the magic. It gets me carried away.
‘You’re up early,’ he says. No platitudes or hellos. We have never had them. It has always been, Pick up where you left off. There is no need to pretend that you don’t know each other. ‘I’d have thought you would be sleeping still.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I didn’t sleep much at all, really.’ I do not sleep well. I never have.
‘It’s not like you won’t get the chance,’ he says. I switch the call to video, to see his face. He isn’t paying attention: I see the side of his head, cigarette in his mouth. He is looking at something off-screen. When he turns to the screen he notices me, and he grins. ‘How are you feeling about it?’
‘I am not exactly happy,’ I say. I am terrified of being put to sleep. The plan with the ship was that we would accelerate at a rate so much faster than we could from Earth, burning less fuel than if we had to break the atmosphere on this trip, less drag; and then we could coast. Constant acceleration, controlled by the ship itself. The ship has levels she can reach, speeds she cannot surpass, and we would control all that. Tomas and I, we are in control. But when we first move, the acceleration will be such that we will need to be asleep. We have constructed and designed beds that the crew can lie in to protect them, and we will be surrendering to chemicals to make it easier. I despise the idea: I have spent hours (by which I mean days, weeks, months of thought) looking into ways to make this part of the process easier for me. I have argued until I am blue in the face that I will stay there still and silent, and that it will be fine. Tomas has argued in turn that my body might not want to do what I tell it. He’s right, of course: there’s no way I could stand the pressure being put onto us. I would probably end up doing something – moving slightly, fidgeting – and getting myself killed. The concoction that we are using to induce sleep will also introduce a mild skeletal paralytic into our bodies, to ensure stillness and calm. It’s all part of the drive towards efficiency.
This is what Tomas and I offered to the committee with our plan: our sense of efficiency. Everything was to be different to the way that they did it last time. The last trip into space was twenty-three years ago, and they were a ruinous lot. They set us back decades, I believe. When they disappeared, never to be heard from again – as if space is a fairy story, something less than tangible – all funding went. Private investors, the life-line to the modern scientist, disappeared. Everything they did was wrong. I can pick holes. They launched from Earth, even though it made no sense, even back then. They spent money on automated systems because they believed they would add efficiency. They were wrong, as proven by their disappearance. They spent billions developing ridiculous gravity systems, something that the Russians prototyped back in the previous decade concerning gravitomagnetism. And why? So that they could rest! So that they could feel the sensation of a ground beneath their feet! They took a journalist with them, because they spun their mission into something commercial, something outside science. They took a man who didn’t serve a purpose with them on a mission that could have meant something. What did that cost them, that folly? They played everything badly, a product of moneymen rather than scientific design. It drove Tomas and myself insane. And when they went missing, the balloon deflated overnight. No more space travel. There is nothing new out there to find, and no glory to be garnered from dying in the cold expanse of space as they surely did. All the corporations involved distanced themselves, because that isn’t a visual that marketeers like: drink our cola as we spin out into the nothing. Most of us – scientists – felt as if they let us down. That’s a hard truth, but a truth nonetheless. When Tomas and I decided that we would do this, we decided that we would do everything better. This – space, discovery – it deserved better.
So I lie to Tomas now, and tell him that I am fine with the process. ‘It won’t matter to me,’ I say. ‘I will sleep and then I’ll wake up.’ He will know that I am lying, but this is what we do: it’s the way of twins, I suspect. ‘This is nothing worth worrying over. It’s only sleep.’
‘It’s not natural though, is it?’ I can hear him smirking as he prods. His voice and mine are exactly the same. The same tone and timbre, and when we speak English – which we do all the time, because somehow, over the last twenty years, it’s actually become easier to do it than revert back to a language that is now so close to dead it almost hurts to say the words – when we speak it, our accents are the same. We both got this from watching English-language television when we were children. We learned how to say words exactly the same way. American/English/Swedish. A curious hybrid. So we sound the same, and our mouths move the same way. Of course, we never used to hear it; it’s like when you listen to yourself on the radio, and you never sound as you expect. But now, after years of it, I can tell the sound of his smirk because it is the sound of mine. It has the same intonation, the same rise and fall. ‘So, listen to me,’ he says, ‘you’ll be fine. Nobody ever dies from sleeping in those things.’ He knows that somebody did, in the last trip. They woke up and the captain was dead, gone while he slept.
‘What do you want?’ I ask him.
‘You called me,’ he says. I don’t remember it being that way, but instead of arguing we discuss the breakdowns of the fuel delivery, which is still ongoing: reserve tanks being fitted, able to be connected via a channel that we can manually open if needed. The fuel is kept frozen – I mean, it’s far more complicated than that, but essentially – until it is needed, so that we can control its release perfectly, down to the last, ensuring that nothing is wasted. And frozen it’s compressed, meaning we can take more than we need, in theory. I sit at my computer while he talks and I cycle the cameras, so that I can see the ship: plugged in, docked to the NISS by rigid arms that we designed ourselves, that we had built, that we had installed. She doesn’t drift. She moves with us, like an appendage. There have been, over the past few days, people out there working on her. Checking her final systems, making sure that everything is as it should be. There is a crane arm attached to the NISS that was helping them, delivering the fuel and the provisions. Now, the crane is silent and still. There is only one man out there, on his own. I don’t know what he’s doing exactly. It will be logged somewhere, and I am intrigued, so I call up the spreadsheets and systems while Tomas talks, and I look for activity. The answer: he is cleaning the cameras. There are no exterior windows on the ship, only cameras, and he is cleaning them for us. Tomas can see what I am looking at, the computer screens and videos mirrored down there. Everything is parity.
‘I have thought it might be nice, you know,’ Tomas says, breaking his own chain of thought, changing the subject.
‘What?’
‘Doing that. Cleaning. Just something menial, you know? You’re still in space, but that’s like, I don’t know. It’s free, I think. Without this responsibility.’ He sounds almost wistful.
‘We’re privileged, Brother,’ I say. ‘We get to travel to the stars instead of waiting and watching them.’
‘You get to, you mean.’ We haven’t argued about our roles, not ever. He has always maintained that he is happy with the result: that he has his life down there, and he would have hated to leave it. I am alone, and still it remains so up here. ‘For me, it’s in the future. Another time.’ That was the deal we made. After this, if we run another, he goes up and I stay down. ‘This is good, though. Running things here, Mira: you wouldn’t believe the minutiae.’
‘I’m sure,’ I say.
‘But now you have what you wanted. I am happy for you, Brother. Relish it.’ So we both look out of the window, me here and him watching on a computer screen two hundred and fifty miles below in a part of Florida that seems as if it has only ever really existed for the purpose of launching humanity into space. Neither of us says goodbye. That’s how our conversations end, as they begin: one running into the other in a constant flow, as if no time has passed between us at all.
All of this was done before we came up here, the crew and myself. The ship was primarily constructed on Earth, then brought up for tweaks and reworking. The final layer of spit and polish. But we have only been up here a few days. We wanted to give our crew as much time on Earth as possible, as much time with their families. It’s a litany of ways that the last trip really messed these things up: they sent their people to space camp for months before. As if that would help! We relocated the families of the people that we wanted, the people that were best for the job, and we gave them houses and put their children in schools. We wanted them to have as much of their life as possible. A happy crew, Tomas has always maintained, is a positive and productive crew. Some of them have families: Hikaru Morgan, one of our pilots, has a newborn baby, only a few months old. By the time we return, she will be crawling. We have even paid the money to fast-track her, so maybe it’ll be more than crawling. Maybe talking. We wanted to make sure that they never resented us for taking them away, no matter how great the cause. Everything we have done has been to ensure that, yes, they are as efficient as possible.
I do not have a wife and children, or anything worth me missing. I am not well liked; I have no friends, no lovers. Tomas and I were nearly alone at our mother’s funeral, and it was only after she died that he began to look for women. I said to him, This is you seeking a way to replace her. He said, And so what? It’s better that I know that when I begin this. He found some women online, the sort of women he was looking for; the sort who were looking for the same thing as him. I told him that I couldn’t stand the thought of forcing myself to connect with people like that; that conventional wisdom, everything I have seen in my life, tells me that there needs to be something organic. He told me that saying that was an admission of how alone I was anyway, and how willing I was to stay that way. He said, A relationship forged on mutual desperation can absolutely work, because you both know that you are starting from rock bottom. You are both already as alone as each other. In this way he met his girlfriend, and they began dating. She moved in with him after I don’t know how many weeks. Far too few. She is a flake, and I don’t find her physically attractive, which makes me wonder if he really does. We have the same tastes in most other things, I know that. She doesn’t understand our work, also, which would be a barrier for me. She is a baker. She works in a bakery, and she understands cakes and breads. I sometimes think that she must find everything he says about our work so impressive because she cannot understand a word of it.
We have gathered the crew together for a meal, one last hurrah before we leave. I am uncomfortable with the lack of gravity: I am pitiably ungraceful, and I am forced to cling to the guide rails that have been installed. We have a system of magnetic carabiner clips that we developed to help us lock onto them, to keep us stable. They are all throughout the NISS, and they are all throughout the ship. Safety, efficiency: these are easy watchwords. The crew have all been told that today is free: no work. The safety checks are run by others. Today, they can talk to their loved ones, send messages, relax. The meal we have laid on is special: prepared by a chef from Earth, not freeze-dried and preserved, but something actually cooked for this occasion. He made it down there and we had it brought it up here on the last transport. We have champagne as well, and I pass out the boxes with the food in and the flasks with the alcohol.
‘Go easy,’ I say. ‘Remember that it will hit you like a wall, here. You don’t want a hangover for launch, do you?’ They laugh, and Wallace – actually Andy Wallace, but he likes to be called by his surname, as if he is constantly being ordered around – he mimes drinking it down in one. He even mimes the gulps, and he smirks. He is a funny guy. Not a practical joker, though, and usually dry with his humour, but he’s funny. ‘And remember,’ I say, ‘this is the last proper meal you’ll have for a while. After this, everything is vacuum packed or dried, okay?’ They groan, but really, it’s not an issue. The food that we have selected is fine for the purpose. We – Tomas and myself – have had control over every single aspect of this trip. The food, the way that the ship looks, the technology we have used inside it, the people that we hired. We made demands that the United Nations Space Agency initially balked at, but that’s the beauty of demands: they can cause a standstill until you get what you want. We insisted on extra fuel, because you cannot be too cautious where that is concerned. We insisted on the development of the proxy system, where Tomas can control the ship from the ground if needs be. Tomas developed the entire system, in fact, working hard on it from day one. We insisted on decent meals, privacy in the bed pods, the development of a far better communication bandwidth than had been previously afforded. We didn’t have to make many concessions either, because what were they going to do? We showed that we could bring the project in on time and on budget. And we were so up against the clock. That’s the crucial thing, I suppose: as soon as the anomaly became visible and on their radar, there was no way for them to back out. Something had to be done, and we would do it. So a huge amount of technology on the ship is ours, either developed by us, or in conjunction. We bought licences and patents and hired the people who would make what we needed. We made the ship exactly what it needs to be to do this mission. Anything less and we would be running so many risks, more than were acceptable, just as the Ishiguro did twenty-three years ago.
So I fluster and try to control myself, and I drift next to Wallace and I hold my flask up to clink it against his. He was chosen because he had a background on jets, which made sense. He used to work on the commercial atmosphere planes, and he was the one responsible for their fuel systems, their landing systems. He was the one who was developing the guidance proxy, meant to be able to be used to guide in planes in hazardous conditions, and to prevent terror attacks. We bought it, and him, because they will be invaluable. We may never use that particular aspect, but the fact that we have it and that it works is cause for such a sigh of relief.
On the other side of me, Tobi White. I am flanked by the Americans. She’s a pilot, absolutely the best that we could find. She flew as a teenager, taught by her father, who was a United States Air Force pilot, so she went that route herself when she could. Honours, all the rest. Top of her class. One tour of duty, injured – crashed, but survived – in Palestine, and we stepped in when she was healthy again. We had carte blanche to take whomever we wanted from the various armies and air forces, but we wanted the pilots to want it as well. We wanted everybody to see this as the opportunity that it is. What Tomas and I liked about Tobi is that she is driven by instinct. It’s innate and inside her: acting before she even knows what she’s doing. We liked that, and so we sought a balance with our other pilot, Hikaru. Asian by way of Wales, in the United Kingdom, and the single calmest man I have ever met. He is – and Tomas laughs at this cliché, always has done – but he is very zen. Something like that. He isn’t a Buddhist; instead, he follows one of the religions that sprang up in the last decade, one of those new ones designed to help organize your life, straighten out your way of thinking, promote productivity. It is not my business what you believe in or how you worship, only that you are good at your job. He eats nothing but white food, wears only white clothes. No pressure for us: we made sure that as many of the meal bars were bleached as possible, and he has his own supply. We are very accepting.
Next to him, my research assistant, Lennox Deng. He’s young and eager and irritating. Top of his year, I am told, although that means nothing to me. Tomas was top of our class, which leads to him believing that it’s a lofty achievement. I was third, but that was because I was attempting other things. I was pushing the envelope, trying to see further than just the research we were tasked with. Lennox, to me, is a follower, therefore. I see him as the sort of person who will do as I say because he wants to get the best report. Perhaps this is what you want from an assistant in a place like this. He is insistent and obsessed with the wonder of this endeavour, as a child might be. I am perhaps more practical now. Not that the stars are not magnificent, because they are: but I have seen them. I have spent my life looking at them. With this mission, perhaps there is a chance for something else? Answers, rather than wonder. What we will find out there might not be visually stunning, it might not be something that decorates a postcard, but it might be an answer to something. What is the question? Well, we don’t know that yet either. But Lennox: he is two birds with the one stone, a degree in engineering and a doctorate in astrophysics. Maybe he wasn’t my first choice, but he’s a sensible one. Besides which, it was an easy win I could give to Tomas.
Then there is our doctor, but she isn’t here yet. She is arriving tonight. She has been in last-minute training sessions, because she was a replacement. Our original doctor, some prick from Los Angeles, as they so often are, he bailed at the last minute. I said to Tomas that I could see it coming. He was that sort of person. We went through uniforms, training: millions of dollars spent on him, essentially. He kept asking questions about what happened on the Ishiguro, why it didn’t come back, and we kept saying, We don’t know, it just didn’t, but we have taken every precaution, blah blah blah. We told him, categorically, that it wouldn’t happen to us, but that didn’t make any difference in the end. He disappeared. So we went to the backup: Inna Gulansky. She’s amazing, really. She’s older than Tomas and myself by some years, and she’s been a field surgeon for most of her life. Tomas found her file, and I went with his choice, so that we could sign her off as quickly as possible. I didn’t question the choice once I saw her history. She was the doctor who came up to operate on the ISS last decade, so she’s already done zero-g triage, things that the guy she’s replacing could have only dreamed of. But her final stages of training have been happening without us, tucked away in some warehouse in Moscow, and that training prevented her coming up here with the rest of us. They wanted to ensure that she was absolutely ready. I have only met her a handful of times, but I can already tell that she will be an invaluable asset. I have told her, This will be an injury-free trip, that’s my decree, and she said, Well, why am I coming then? That is a good question! I said. She is full of good questions.
Now, here, when we’re nervous, everybody wants to talk with Tobi and Hikaru. She’s bright and bubbly, and she’s got so many stories about her life that it’s almost distracting; whereas he’s a picture of perfect calm, so much that it’s almost infectious. He tells us first about meditative techniques we can use when we are nervous about situations such as this, and then she tells a story about her father taking her up in a plane, about her first crash – her first landing where the plane didn’t survive but she walked away – when she was sixteen.
‘It’s all about knowing how to meet the ground,’ she says.
‘Not a lot of that where we’re going,’ Wallace says. His quip disarms her, throws her story off. She tilts her head at him and squints. She does that, I’ve noticed, when people make a joke at her expense. It rolls off. I seize the opportunity, the gap in the conversation. Tomas told me that I should make a speech to rouse them, to make sure that we’re all on the same page. I cough for attention, and I push slightly away from the wall, into the middle of the room. They all look at me. I do not know that I am much of a leader, but I am something. I am what they’ve got.
‘Hello,’ I begin, ‘I just wanted to say a few words. There will be more tomorrow, and the press will be involved, but this is just all of us, now. We have important work to be doing out there. Very important work.’ They are all smiling. Maybe they are just humouring me, because I know that I am bad at speeches, bad at all of this stuff. I know that I am not making eye contact with them; I am looking at my hands, at the paper that I wish I had to read from. I know all of this. ‘We all remember when they did this last. We remember how it all went wrong. But they were different, because they didn’t have you people as a crew.’ I have lost their smiles. I haven’t thought this through. I ask myself how Tomas would save this, and I remember the champagne substitute. I raise my flask. ‘So, you know,’ I say, and I start clapping my hand against the flask, ‘applaud yourselves! To us!’ I raise it high, and then I say it again. ‘To us!’ They all repeat it, and we all drink, and I see them looking at each other, little glances out of the sides of their eyes. I have fucked this up, I know.
I quietly mumble at them that I have to go and do some final checks, so I fluster to the rail, leaving my food but taking my flask, and I pull myself along and back to my room. It takes too long, and when I am there I fasten myself to the chair with the magnets and I call Tomas, and I swallow the remains of my drink back in one, sucking it through the little semi-permeable straw and feeling it spark and fizz on my tongue and the back of my throat.
‘Did you inspire them?’ he asks. He was listening, I am sure. Why would he not have been listening? So this is a lie, his asking me. It’s him giving me a chance.
‘I did my best,’ I say. ‘What are you doing?’
‘We’re watching projections of what could happen if it all goes wrong.’ I don’t ask him any more about them. I’ve seen the projections myself. We are sure that we will be fine; but in case we’re not, we have to run these things. They are terrifying, because there isn’t a single one in which any of the crew manage to survive.
The reason for this mission is to examine something that we do not understand. We know it as an anomaly. We first knew about the anomaly – and, by we, I mean the world – six years after the Ishiguro went missing. The world was not told about the anomaly at the time, and so when they disappeared and didn’t come back, it was a complete disaster. Tomas and I watched it on the news: the desperate wait for any sort of news from the lost shuttle. There were so many cameras in the launch centre, with the men and their computers and the branding everywhere. Showing endless, constant VT of the various astronauts as if they were participants in a reality show. Eventually the cameras packed up, and the news cycle was reduced to a small notice at the end that simply stated how many days they had been missing for. Everybody moved on. There was a funeral when it was decided that their fuel would have run out, that their life support would have disappeared. And then, after a while, they worked out where the ship must have dropped off the radar, and then later, they announced more details. A drip-feed of updates, holding things back when they were not ready for public consumption. Records from the ship’s journey; information from the journalist, useless and garbled.
Then one day the newly named UNSA announced that they knew of something, out there in space, out where the Ishiguro had been. The UNSA was little more than a conglomerate of companies and investors and governmental bodies plucked from the remnants of NASA and other space agencies, given a ridiculous name to seem important. They disclosed that the thing first appeared a decade before. There was patch of space that nobody could see properly: as if it was nothingness. It had been designated the catalogue number 250480 – they could only give it a number because nobody knew what it was. There were hundreds of thousands of these things up there somewhere: things that we didn’t understand, but that were catalogued with their little numbers and a file on a hard drive somewhere. It had been discovered before by Dr Gerhardt Singer, and he had been on the Ishiguro to try and learn more about it. It wasn’t important, that was the party line – that Inspire the world! bullshit was the primary reason for the launch of the Ishiguro – but it was clear that it was the important thing about their trip to him. He knew that there was a differential in the readings from it, simply because you could ping it and get nothing in return. The stars that used to be forthcoming, eventually, with their locations, he got nothing back from them. The anomaly was, as best every telescope could tell, nothing. There was nothing inside it. Nothing past it. And yet, it had to be something. Even a definite nothing is always a something. Dr Singer’s readings were correct, but they were brushed to one side as something to worry about another time.
When they announced the anomaly – and I say announced, but what I’m talking about is an update on a website, not a press release – they pointed out that they had singularly failed to get readings from the thing, because the probes that they sent to it malfunctioned. That didn’t mean anything: there’s a margin of error with anything technological. Two probes they sent, over a six-year period, both ostensibly to find the wreckage of the Ishiguro, but checking out the anomaly as they went, and they returned nothing, as if the thing wasn’t there. No readings: machines could not do what humans were needed for. And that’s where Tomas and I came in. We had worked with Dr Singer before he left, when we were students, in deep admiration of his work – of his role as an explorer – and we attempted to carry on his work, when we had the time. We were fuming after they spoke publicly about the anomaly, because they were denying that it was important. Tomas and I, we knew that it had something to do with the disappearance of the Ishiguro. Nothing is coincidence. Everything that happens anywhere happens with purpose and meaning. We went to the UNSA and we showed them our results, based on Dr Singer’s research. Extrapolations and summations, but with some immutable, incontestable facts: the anomaly was either moving or growing, because the space that it occupied was different. At that distance, it was hard to gauge almost infinitesimally small movements on that scale. But it was, one way or another, closer to us – to the Earth – than it had been when Dr Singer found it, and when the Ishiguro went out to examine it. It was moving. (Or, as Tomas surmised, unfolding. He has his own theories, and I have mine. We are not that similar; or, we try and cover all bases.) We plotted exactly where it was, using readings from every telescope and satellite available to us. When you concentrate and focus, you see the things that others miss. Stars that were registering as present from one satellite at any given point might not return a ping from Jodrell Bank. We focused on the anomaly, put our careers into it, our reputations. Tomas said, It’s better to be an expert in one thing that might be important than in many things that matter only a little bit.
The UNSA panicked then. They worried. More probes were sent, and they were lost as well. Everything there was lost. One of them, one of the people who approved the funding – he was the most desperate, his hands ready to sign funds to us before we even finished our first presentation – asked us what would happen if it reached the Earth. We said, We don’t even know what it is, yet. Let us find out. We showed them a map we’d made, and expressed in real terms the actual scale of what we were dealing with. They didn’t take long to reach the decision of a green light, on one condition: one of us would need to be up there, knowing what we were looking at. The other would stay at home and guide the operation from there.
One job sounded like what we had always wanted to do, the excitingly childish dream; the other somehow more prosaic role. Drier, certainly. We played for it. We have always played for it. Whoever won was going onto the ship, up into space, to the anomaly, the prize of this thing. It was decisive, my victory: I had fought for it, and I deserved it. I never gloated, because that wasn’t our way. We just got on with it. We planned the entirety of the trip meticulously. No room for error, and no error likely. Tomas framed the plan, seventeen printed A4 sheets of times and dates, and mounted it on the wall of our lab. I asked him why he framed it, and he said, It’s not going to change, so I might as well.
Our launch time has been set for over a year now. I look at my watch and I’ve got four hours. In two hours I have to report for duty, then I have to be sedated and strapped into my bed, and I will be made to sleep.
When it is time, we will all go into that darkness out there.
Tomas was first born, by three hours and forty-one minutes. I was if not a surprise, then a miracle, because they had no idea I was stuffed in there as well. The people who delivered me, who were not real doctors, started to tell my mother to rest rather than to keep pushing, because her job was done. Her baby, Tomas, had been born, and with that they assumed she was finished. My mother was a hippie, back when such a name meant something. She was into free love or whatever, and she was eighteen and had run away from home and lived on a reservation near these marshlands in Sweden and she didn’t believe in doctors. (We would argue, as she lay dying in the hospital bed that we forced her to lie in, that at least they fucking existed in the first place, so it wasn’t something she could contest. I don’t believe in them, or anything that they do, she told us, and we said, Well they’re real! And they could have saved your life! Instead of doctors, she believed in angels and psychic energies and trees that breathed at night.) Because of this lack of faith – a denial of scans and tests performed before she slid into her birthing pool and spread her thighs – she didn’t know that I was coming. I was a miracle. Tomas was abandoned, pushed to one side as they held me aloft. We are not equal, not completely. He has a birthmark stretched across half of his face, a wine stain that truly was there from birth. As she cradled him before I appeared, she apparently reasoned his mark away. It would clear itself up, was her logic. (A doctor might have told her differently, of course, but no.) When she finally held me, three hours after I began my climb out, she proclaimed me to be a mirakel: my looks, my health, my name. Mirakel – Mira, because I would never use that horrifying name, so gauche, a name that is such a product of who my mother was rather than anything resembling sense or logic, a name that would have lost me any respect within the scientific community – Hyvönen, brother of Tomas, son of Lära and some man who never existed, for all that I know of him. One of many people in a photograph of hundreds, drunk at some festival or other. I am the product of my mother’s loose virtues, and I am a scientist.
The names were competition for us, as she didn’t change my brother’s name to something more impressive; so he had to prove himself. He was older, wiser, in theory, and he shrugged it off in what he said and how he acted. Not underneath. Underneath, as we raced each other through school – excelling in the logical subjects, with proper results reliant on knowledge and skill and being able to use your brain, and thus attain results that could be gauged, pitted against each other – then university, and doctorates, neck and neck the whole time, I was still the mirakel. I would still be there second but more perfect, and his face bore that scar the whole time. Not a scar, no, that’s unfair: in my darkest moments, as we fought, that’s what I would call it. It’s a mark. It singles him out. It allows people to tell us apart, as otherwise we would be identical, monozygotic. We are in our forties now, and tired. Both of us are tired. And this trip, this excursion, it’s our dream. When we stopped fighting, we joined forces. When we stop competing, we’re unstoppable.
I’m the second to arrive at the gateway to the Lära. It was in our contract that we could name the ship, that Tomas and I would be able to choose what we would call it by ourselves. Her name is a word that means a theory, like a scientific supposition; and it was also our mother’s name. It seemed appropriate: taken from the centuries-old tradition of naming ships after women. Gods or women, that’s how you named a ship – never mind that the Ishiguro broke those traditions, celebrating the engineer who designed the engines.
Wallace is already here. He’s leaning against the wall, and he looks weary. I can’t blame him. He looks at me and nods. He will have just said his goodbyes to his family, and I assume that he would like it to stay quiet for a while longer; I don’t have an issue with that. From the windows here, I can see the hull. I can see the panels, the bolts and fixtures holding them to each other. I know how they’re held in place, and what’s under each one. The design of this ship is entirely our own. We built this for practicality. There is a reason that spaceships look like they do. With the Ishiguro, that was just another in their colossal series of egomaniacal fuck-ups. They built a ship that looked like something from a film, that had no place being in space. It was built for its toyetic qualities, the design licensed out before they even took off; ours has been constructed to work perfectly, efficiently. To actually serve its purpose.
From here, down the tunnel, is an airlock. The other side of it leads you to a changing room, outfitted with benches and suits for exterior walks. One room off that is the bathroom, of our own design. Nobody likes shitting into a suction tube, I told Tomas, but that’s what has to happen. Might as well make it as comfortable as possible. So it’s a pod, and there’s a seat, and there’s a vacuum seal around your ass made by the seat, which is of a jelly, almost, malleable. It fits to you. There is no hose or inverted gas mask. No good for urination, though, so that’s still into a funnel, but that’s easier to deal with. The shower uses a vacuum as well, pulling through a grate at the bottom, and the water is pressure-pushed from the top. In theory, on a good day, it’s like a waterfall or a car wash, fast and hard and maybe not very pleasant, but it’ll get you clean.
Through from there is the bedroom, which has the beds set at a 40-degree angle off the floor, arranged around each other in a circle. We paid for a special darkening finish on the glass, which goes black on both sides, blocking light if you want, because it means that people can sleep while others work. No need to have lights out, or bedtime. This doubles as our sick bay as well, in case. Through from there is our living quarters, and at the neck of that room the cockpit, all built into one area. Less space than our predecessor, but theirs was extravagant. We’ve reserved more room for the essentials – fuel, food, the communications system that we had built – and taken away space for play. Tomas and I both agreed that it was unnecessary. The cockpit is state of the art. In the old Apollo spacecraft, they had open panels, hundreds of buttons. Every part of the process had to be performed under a strict regimen, an order in which things had to be done. They were suffering a basic lack of understanding of automated processes, but that is a hobby of mine. Ergo, we have tried to make this easier but still retain the functionality. We have cut down on what can go wrong, that’s all. A lot is controlled by computer – life support, air supply, fuel intake – but we can take control back if we need to. We can do it from here, and Tomas can do it from Earth. That’s thanks to the communications system, and how we’ve managed to get the signal to carry enough data, relaying it with satellites. Back in the Ishiguro’s day, such an undertaking would probably have been impossible. We haven’t had a chance to test it, not outside of satellite commands, but that’s always the way with new technologies. So much of it is theoretical until it suddenly works and you’re proven correct.
Hikaru is next to arrive, and he is grinning.
‘This is exciting,’ he says. We have a special cupboard of food especially for him, of white bars of soya and tofu and processed chicken. He’s not fussy about drink colour, apparently: just the food. Tobi and Lennox arrive together, and with them is Inna. Tobi pulls herself to the side and waves her hand out, allowing Inna past, as if this is some sort of formal greeting. Everybody smiles and greets her. They’ve all met her before, but only briefly, when she wasn’t originally a part of this team. Bonding was low on the list of our desired achievables before launch; far lower than making sure that she was ready for this challenge.
‘Hello,’ she says. She shakes our hands, reintroducing herself. None of us have forgotten her name, because she’s vital to this, and because we’ve all been talking about when she would join us.
‘Great to have you,’ Hikaru says. ‘You as excited as we are?’
‘Just about,’ she says. Her accent is curious. She’s from Georgia – Soviet, not American – but lived in England for most of her life. Her voice is very soft, only giving a hint of its origins on her Rs. She’s ten years older than Andy and myself, and in better physical shape than almost anybody else here, which is really saying something. Not sure how much of it is tinkered. ‘Can’t pretend that I’m not nervous,’ she says. She stretches the letters out, then the whole word. It sounds different, almost alien in its delivery. My own accent has been softened and lost if it was ever there in the first place; the rise and fall of my own language washed out. Hers is still there, and still prominent. Nerrrvous, she says, or it sounds.
‘You’d be crazy if you weren’t, I reckon,’ says Tobi.
I feel sick, and this feels loose. Wrong. I need to speak with Tomas one last time. I can feel the lack of gravity inside me. My guts, swollen up and churning, and like the slightest movement could upset me, could end this for me. I back away from them all, down the corridor, around the corner, and I open a connection and whisper at him that I need to hear his voice.
‘What’s wrong now?’ Tomas asks.
‘Are you sure we’ve done everything we can?’
‘Have a safe flight, Brother,’ he replies – he calls it a flight, which sounds so demeaning for what this actually is – and I hear the click of him cancelling the connection. Over the speaker system, the launch crew announce that they are opening up the airlock entrance. We’re boarding.
2 (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
Every part of this process has been designed to ensure that nothing can go wrong. I cannot stress that enough: the level of control that we have enacted on this entire operation. Entry to the Lära is as controlled as everything else. There is no room for error. Everything must be checked, processed, run through before we are allowed on. There are exacting checklists full of bullet points that take days to tick off. It’s these things that can mean the difference between life and death. This is how the systems can be guaranteed to work when we need them to, how we can streamline them and make them user friendly while still retaining the safety: they are prepared and perfected, and instigated with absolute care and diligence.
‘Are we getting on anytime soon?’ Tobi asks. She looks at the clock on the wall. Less than half an hour until we leave. Sedation takes only a few minutes to completely set in; the paralysis less. We don’t control the boarding process from the ship: we are nothing but passengers for now.
‘Not long,’ I say. I am running through their final checks in my head, and as I reach the final one, the door opens. It slides satisfyingly and the launch crew inside the ship move backwards, grinning. They’ve got balloons and a banner, both hanging in the middle of the air. My crew laughs, almost hysterically. Bon Voyage, the banner says. From the moon to the stars, under it in smaller type. They applaud, and we applaud them. We walk through to the corridor in single file as the ground crew start pulling aside the decorations, and we all find the bed labelled with our names. (I pretend to not know which one is mine, even though I dictated where the beds lie. I arranged them, like chess pieces.)
‘I want to go last,’ I say to Inna. She nods.
‘You’re nervous?’ Nerrrvous.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ve been sedated before. Nothing to be scared of.’
‘Good,’ she says. ‘I always think it takes better the less wary you are.’ She preps her injections. She clicks the first one in, a bullet into the hypo’s chamber. I catch a glimpse of a mark – a tattoo, I think – on her collarbone as she moves, as the fabric of her shirt pulls away, but not enough to see what it is. I wonder what it is of. I wonder how big it is. ‘Who’s first?’ she asks the group. Hikaru raises his arm, and, in one motion, starts to roll up his sleeve. ‘Neck,’ Inna says. ‘It’s better there. It takes faster.’ He shrugs and lies back on the bed. The magnets click in, holding him in place, and she folds herself down a little to reach him. The hypo seems to fizz as it empties the contents of the pod into him. He winces, and then shudders, shaking the injection off.
‘Nothing to it,’ he says. The others line up one by one, and they all act as if it’s nothing, but I see in their hands the mild tremble of fear at the injection itself; or, maybe, at the thought of being asleep and not being in control. I never used to drink, for that loss; I never used to take painkillers, for the same. Tobi goes first, then Lennox, then Wallace, and then Inna turns to me. ‘You next,’ she says.
‘One second,’ I say, as she readies the hypo. I pull myself to the cockpit and open a connection to Tomas. ‘Can you hear me?’ I ask him.
‘What is it?’ Tomas sounds annoyed at the sound of my voice. I know how busy he must be. I speak quietly, and turn away from the rest of the crew. I don’t want anybody to see that I’m worried.
‘Is everything okay?’
‘It’s fine. Why would it be anything other than okay?’
‘I just wanted to check.’
‘You think that I would let the launch happen if everything wasn’t okay?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘I have work to do, Mira.’ And then he’s gone. I turn back to Inna, who’s waiting. ‘Let me get into the bed,’ I say. ‘Do it there.’ I am next to the central controls on one side, with Inna on the other.
‘You can’t,’ she says. ‘You have to do me after I’ve done you.’ I nod and sit on the edge of the bed, unbuttoning the top of my shirt, and I pull it down to show the part she needs. She leans in: I feel the press of the needle. Like a bore, followed by the break of the skin, and the liquid. That’s the worst part: feeling it rushing inside of you, something where it should not be, mingling. It hurts for a second, nothing more. ‘It’ll only be a couple of minutes before you feel it,’ she says, and she pulls her top to one side and exposes the tattoo again. I can see more of it: the head of a bird, blue and yellow, eyes wide, mouth open. An eagle’s beak. It seems to run lower, towards her chest itself. She puts the capsule in and then hands me the hypo, and points with her finger to where I should place the nib.
‘Ready?’ I ask.
‘Of course,’ she says. The hypo rests against the peak of the bird’s head. I press the button and she barely reacts; I pull it away. She folds her top back up. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘time for sleep.’ She swings her body round into the bed and I hear the hiss of the magnets. ‘They lower the doors for us?’ she asks.
‘They will, but you can do it yourself if you want.’ I glance over at the others, their frontages still up. ‘Sleep well, everybody,’ I say. They murmur; they’re already under. It hits you like you don’t know it’s coming, and you’re suddenly elsewhere, in total darkness. It’s brutal, how fast it is. Inna lies back.
‘See you when we wake up,’ she says. She reaches for the lid; her touch alone makes it descend, bringing it down around her. The glass darkens as it lowers. I flatten myself against the bed as well, and I fasten the magnets, and I try to stay still, because I am still not used to this; the feeling of never being flat, of never being orientated one way over the other. I rest my head on the bed, snug inside the plastic form that’s been moulded around our individual physical shapes. I wait until a click comes over the intercom, and I hear Tomas’ voice.
‘This is the first milestone on the road to the stars,’ Tomas says. ‘Beds closing in five. Four.’ He finishes the countdown and the glass slides down and seals me in. Enough air to breathe, to sustain, that’s the deal. When you sleep you naturally need less. Your body rights itself, puts itself into a state of optimum intake. It aids the depth of your sleep as well, having less air. I shut my eyes and wait for sleep to take me. I know that it cannot be long now.
I hear the engines kick in, and the rumble that they send throughout the entire ship. For that second, it feels like an explosion. I hear the joining door being retracted, and the order that it be so, and I hear Tomas’ voice over the intercom telling the ground crew to prepare for launch. I keep my eyes shut and think about the path we’re going to take, and how the launch will look. We’ve run so many simulations – and a simulation was how we knew to launch from the NISS in the first place, how the money saved on building an extension here to do it was proven to be the right choice by another simulation – and I can see them all running at the same time.
When I used to fly in airplanes I would shut my eyes for a second as we took off and picture the plane exploding, bursting into flame. They say that if a plane is going to crash, it’s statistically most likely to happen as it takes off. I figured that if I got past that I was pretty safe. I imagine this ship exploding. I imagine the pieces floating all around me in space. I imagine me floating amongst them.
Tomas does the other checks, his voice talking through every stage, and I start to wonder why I’m not asleep yet. I should be, by now. This is crucial. Sometimes people need a few minutes to really let the sedative sink in, I remind myself. Sometimes the body’s natural adrenalin, the endorphins, they need longer to be counteracted and swallowed by the sleep. But then: now I am worrying that I am not asleep. In my life I have insomnia, I suppose, of a sort: when pressure mounts and the following day carries any sort of importance, I will worry all night, worry that I am not going to achieve the required amount of sleep to function at an optimum the following day. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the worry is then the thing that conspires to keep me awake, rolling around in my head in circular patterns that never stop looping in on themselves. Only when I have given up all hope do I stand a chance of actually falling asleep: when I have managed to pass that point, to realize that there is nothing I can do now, and that the day I was so worried about is likely ruined. It is a hindrance; a horror. I sleep so badly, because almost every day carries that pressure. Tablets do not help, not really: all they do is render me more tired than I would ordinarily be when I awake. Eventually nature takes over and I sleep: but it is fitful, and it is not what I want. This injection: this is to be my salvation for this leg of the journey. After this, I will worry about it as and when.
I cannot see a clock from here. There’s nothing. That’s an oversight, and I should have thought about that. There are no microphones in the beds either, another oversight. It’s to protect the seal: the fewer holes there are, the less chance of there being a crack. The pilot on the Ishiguro died before they even woke up, probably because of a gap in the seal, something like that. So we were cautious. It’ll settle in. I’ll sleep soon, because this is medically controlled. This is something I cannot avoid. On occasions, when I have been at my most desperate for sleep, I have taken painkillers: something strong enough to dull everything else, to remove my faculties from worrying about the sleep itself. This is like a better version of them: unavoidable, inevitable.
‘Launch crew prepare,’ I hear through the ship. You can’t open the beds from the inside once they’ve been sealed. If you could, you could accidentally do it, and there’s nothing worse than that thought. The speeds that the ship will reach as it pushes off from the NISS – free of the trappings of any real gravitational pull, free of the resistance offered by an atmosphere – are so ridiculously powerful that they could – or would – damage the human body. Our bones, our bodies, they are not strong enough. The beds are pressure sealed to provide an environment that the body can cope with. They create their own pressure level inside them; protect the crew from the g forces. It’s another of mine and Tomas’ innovations. Another way that we are making this expedition work. If any of the crew were to be out of their beds – and the controlled environment created therein – they would likely die. Their body would be found pulverized, as if it had been beaten to death. But I am not loose. I am in here, awake. I don’t know if this is dangerous. I cannot think about how dangerous this is. I shout.
‘Help,’ I shout, ‘I am not asleep yet!’ I call Inna’s name, hoping that I’ll see her descend and open my bed, and inject me again, triple-strength, able to level me to slumber while this flight happens. I was always scared of flying as well: of seeing the Earth get smaller underneath me. Not like I will see it from space, that doesn’t faze me, because you can see everything in one go: more the sensation of suddenly glimpsing people as specks, and cars as ants, and then everything smaller and smaller, houses like dust, and then whole towns. But Inna doesn’t come, and everything is dark, soundtracked by the rumble of the engines proper: through everything, right through the hull. Everything underneath me feels like vibration, nothing else. I feel my bones rattle, and my teeth in my jaw. ‘I should be asleep!’ I shout, but my voice dulls itself against the inside of my bed, and against the growling of the ship, and against the paralytic. My words slurred.
The engines fire for launch in three phases. First phase is a warm-up, bringing the temperature of the engines up to the necessary point. The second phase – the phase that I feel kick in through the rumble, like a foot on a gas pedal while the handbrake remains pulled on – adds the injectant and coolant into the burner, readying to add it to the engines themselves. ‘Please,’ I hear myself say – an echo through the rumble – and then the third phase.
‘Countdown time,’ Tomas says. He goes through the numbers, twenty to one. I brace myself. I don’t know what will happen. Why did we have to be asleep for this part of the launch? Because it made sense. Because we were liable to panic. Because the vibrations of the ship would be so violent that we weren’t to struggle against them. I have always hated sleep. Not been afraid of it, that’s wrong, but felt it a waste. Tomas slept less than I did, and he would play pranks on me as I overslept, as I lazed about; but it’s more than that. He would have achieved so much by the time that I woke up. He would have done things. Found things. Now, he’s meant to be awake and guiding me, and I’m meant to be asleep, and letting him, but I’m not. I want to be. I don’t want to die, here. I don’t want to be shaken apart. I tell myself not to struggle. I have the self-control to do this, I tell myself. I say it aloud; or I think that I do.
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 (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
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.’
‘There. Wallace said something,’ Hikaru says to Tobi. ‘Now we eat?’
‘You know what I mean,’ Tobi says. ‘This is pretty big, right? Being up here?’ They all look to me. ‘This must be one of the best feelings, to see this actually happen. To come to fruition.’
‘It’s good,’ I say. I don’t tell them that my insides are tumbling and churning, and that I can’t balance, and that there’s still these fucking white spots blinking in my peripheral vision. I don’t tell them all that I think I was awake during the acceleration. I try to be inspiring. ‘We’ve got a huge challenge ahead of us, and we’ve got a long way to go. Lesser journeys have destroyed people. You have to remember what we’re here for.’ They’re silent. I pause: feeling sick. As if having my mouth open might be my undoing. They’re waiting, and I can feel the churn, and I think that I have nothing else to say. But then I hear a voice the same as mine pick up where I left off:
‘This isn’t something for your CVs, or to tell your grandchildren. This is a mission for the whole human race. There’s something out there, and it’s our job to find out what it is. This isn’t exploration: it’s discovery. It’s potentially finding the next important thing to push humanity forward. This is Columbus returning to the New World, going back there and saying, This is mine. I found this. Now I’m going to fucking start something.’
I had no idea that Tomas was still there, and listening. He said he was going home, but he didn’t. And he doesn’t say goodbye; he just falls silent. Tobi unclips and opens a cupboard at the side and brings out a box of meal bars.
‘Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub,’ she says.
We worked for the UNSA back before that was what it was even called. Back then it was still a collection of companies and ex-DARPA employees trying to put something new together. We wrote a letter and we spent a summer halfway across the world, suddenly in America, and interning for Gerhardt Singer. It was the summer before he went up in the Ishiguro and never came back. Afterwards, we wrote a letter to his partner saying how honoured we were to have met him, to have studied under him. The things that he taught us. I think that’s why we started research into the areas that we did, to carry on his work. (We didn’t tell him that we thought he played it wrong, and took too many chances. That would have been cruel, I think: he was hampered, and it was not all his fault, the choices that were made.) Dr Singer said to us, before we left him at the end of the summer, that the anomaly was his pet project.
You pick something and stick with it, he had told us. Because, if you focus, there’s a chance that it will be important. Some scientists spread themselves too thin, you know? They try lots of different things, go from pillar to post, and they never settle on the one thing. I think it’s better to have something that’s my life’s work – that might be important – than just generalize and leave nothing. He seemed really sad when he spoke about it, as if he might go his whole life and not discover anything. As it turned out, he died, and we don’t know if he ever discovered what the anomaly was. That seems such an inglorious way to go: out here, in the emptiness, still asking that question you have always asked and never being able to get an answer.
Inna comes to see me as I sit by myself above the expanse. There is a screen embedded in the floor. When we were young, our mother took us on holiday to Greece, and we went in a boat with a glass floor, and we could see right down into the ocean, and we could see the fish and the water, how deep it was. When we were designing, we took that concept and adapted it. We fitted a camera into the underside-exterior of the ship, and we layered a screen into the floor that could show that camera’s feed. Tomas was so excited by the idea. Think about it! he said. It’ll be incredible, to be up there, nothing underneath you. It’ll be like you’re floating. It wasn’t meant to be me, that You, I suspect: I suspect he thought it would be him. He wanted to have it constantly on, a constant hole to space. I said that not everybody would want to see that all the time, want to see that nothingness. He said, There’ll be stars, and I said, Well, they don’t count for that much when they’re that far away. I have seen stars every day from right here. He argued at one point that it should be glass, even: a clear, unfiltered view. I told him that was stupid. There was more chance of something going wrong. Everything that could have been a window is now a screen, linked to an external camera. We took all glass out because it was easier. It meant fewer seals, and less chance of anything going wrong under the pressure we would be exerting.
Now I can sit here and look down and see everything. I’ve called up the trackers, and computer visualizations dart across the glass, highlighting planets and galaxies. They trace comets. They assign names, and they tell me distances that can never – or not in my lifetime, not in this craft and with this crew – be reached. But it makes it look as though the galaxy is somehow that much closer. Somehow almost attainable. Inna stares at the same things that I do, circling around me. She puts her hand onto my shoulder, to steady herself. The skin on her hands – all over her, in fact – it looks younger than she actually is. I wonder if she’s had work done. Everybody has; I would not judge her. It would be sensible, probably. It’s so hard to tell nowadays. If we didn’t have everybody’s details, I wouldn’t put her as older than me, not really. But then, I don’t know if I even look my age. I call up details for the screen for what we’re looking at: the age of the stars we’re travelling past at such speed. It’s guesswork aided by supposition, but some of them – based on their brightness, their distance – some of them we’re pretty accurate on, I think.
‘It’s wonderful,’ Inna says. ‘This is something I never even dreamed that I’d get to see.’ I don’t know if this is her way of thanking me for putting her on this trip. She wrote Tomas and me a letter with her application, talking about how excited she would be. How, when she was a girl, she had always dreamed of this, just as Tomas and I had. That’s how you appeal to us: you say, I am just like you. I understand you and what you are trying to do.
‘Aren’t you scared?’ I ask her. She shakes her head.
‘Not now we are up here. Not in the least.’ She dips the tip of her foot at the screen, stretching forward. It focuses on the star nearest her toe-point, and details that system. The name of it, how far it is, when we first logged it as a race. And then it tells how long it would take to get there. She looks at the number, which extends well beyond our lifetimes, and she laughs. ‘That’s why I’m not scared,’ she says. ‘You look at this, it’s easy to see how big it all is. Much bigger than us. Time is something we have such a limited supply of, and I’d rather do something important with what I have got left.’ Everybody wants glory, I do not say to her. It’s embedded inside us, entrenched deep down as part of what makes us human. Tomas joked, after we spoke to her the first time, that I was attracted to Inna. He said that I was, and I protested, but he is that way. He will drive a point home, and he will insist, because he always believes that he is right. You don’t have a chance, he told me, because she has lived, and she has done so much. She’s so worldly, and look at us. We don’t have a world: we have a laboratory. I said to him, You’ve found somebody, and he said, No, we found each other. It’s a two-way situation, Mira. She’s a baker: her kitchen is as much of a lab as ours is. ‘Do you feel pressure?’ Inna asks me. ‘Do you feel that this is somehow harder, because of what has come before?’ The last successful space flight was nearly four decades ago. We’re fighting against the odds.
‘I don’t get pre-occupied with it,’ I say.
‘But it’s there, isn’t it? Hanging over our heads.’
‘I suppose,’ I say.
‘Like the sword of Damocles.’
‘Yes.’ I turn to her. My own foot brushes the screen-floor, and selects a series of planets, sending the data presented into a whirl. ‘I try to not worry about these things. We have made this as foolproof as it can be. But then, we fools can try and test that.’ I smile. I look for a reaction in her face, to my joke. I am trying these things: I have seen Tomas do them, make jokes and win people that way. He has always been better at that stuff than I have. I am trying.
‘It’s normal that you would be worried,’ she says. ‘You have to remember: there’s no pressure to succeed. We do the best we can do.’ I realize that this isn’t the talk that I thought it was. She isn’t impressed by me. She is professional. Her timetable says that she will perform Day One psychiatric evaluations of us. This is mine. I feel everything sink inside me. The ache in my insides, that I had forgotten about, it comes back. I do not know what to say to her.
Then I am saved: a shout comes from the back of the ship. It’s Wallace’s voice, a howl for help, and Inna unclips herself and races off, pushing off with her feet like a swimmer, shooting down the corridor. I fumble with the magnets holding my glove to the rail, and as soon as I am away from the wall I feel myself rock. I feel the bile inside, even through the pills that Inna gave me. I steady myself. I shut my eyes, and I see the white glimmers, the pulsing in my own eyelids.
‘The sword of Damocles – you know that she used it wrong, don’t you?’ Tomas is speaking to me again.
‘Yes’ I say. Of course I know that. He knows that I know it. ‘You’re back,’ I say, changing the subject. ‘Did you sleep?’ It doesn’t seem as if it can have been long enough. Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps he couldn’t sleep. He ignores my question.
‘People just use it to describe any old situation where there’s pressure or what have you. But Damocles took the king’s place, and then he was the only one on the throne. That’s the point of the story: if you’re not king, you don’t sit on the throne, and the sword will never hurt you.’ I know what he’s going to say, because he’s a fucking shit. ‘We’re the kings here, Mira. She can say it’s hanging over all of them, but you know it’s not.’
‘I know the point of the bloody story,’ I snap. I shut my eyes and I try to breathe more. He hears me, through the earpiece. I pull myself along the railing to the side, and then around the corner, past the table and to the corridor hatch. Tomas is quiet then, and I don’t talk to him any more either, but I know he’s still listening to everything we are saying. Nothing will slip past him.
Down the corridor, they are all shouting, and I cannot tell what is wrong through the noise. I am the last one to respond, the slowest. I breathe. I try to breathe.
Tobi is pressed against the floor, being held down by Wallace, and Inna is grabbing at her arms as they flap around. She is convulsing, and she is uncontrollable; only pinned down because they are holding her, and it is taking Wallace and Lennox both to manage this. I imagine her breaking free from this, drifting and twitching. I think about the Ishiguro, and I pray that she isn’t dying. There is no way we would continue. We would be ordered to turn here and head home, because there would be too much at risk. She would jeopardize this all.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask. I can’t see her face properly, because she’s moving so much, and her hair – which is short enough anyway, perpetually tied back, as the sensibilities of zero gravity dictate – her hair is mussed all over her face. I catch a glimpse of one of her eyes, and it looks all white, but I cannot tell if that is true or if it is me: the after-images still dance in my own vision. Then she turns her head on a convulsion, as Inna tries to prep a needle for her, and I see that her other eye is dark red. Just the eye, not running down her face: a thick blood-colour in the eyeball itself.
‘Please,’ Inna says, and Wallace and Lennox hold her extra tightly, really struggling for that second. Inna reaches in and presses the hypodermic to her neck and it only takes a second before Tobi goes limp. Lennox and Wallace let go and she starts to drift; her limbs all loose, her back arched. I think of my mother, and her angels: this is, for a second, as if Tobi is ascending. I stare, and Wallace and Lennox pat each other, checking they’re all right.
‘She’s fine,’ Inna says to me, as if she knew that I was about to ask. ‘It’s a subconjunctival haemorrhage. Bleeds can happen when the body is this stressed. Does she have a history of seizures?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘Tomas approved the medical checks, in the, uh, the personnel files.’ We split the tasks up: he took some approvals, I took others. We shared everything, but his memory of these things will be better than mine, I am sure.
He interrupts. ‘No history, doctor,’ he says. His voice comes over the intercom, filling the corridor. It’s jarring: how sometimes he is only in my ear, and sometimes all around us.
Wallace pulls Tobi towards him and folds her up slightly in his arms.
‘Where shall I take her?’ he asks Inna. He holds her like you would a child, maybe, carrying them to bed. He has daughters; I wonder if he carries them like this as well. She convulses slightly still, and her eyelids flicker. I imagine, under them, her one red eye darting left to right. I think that she could shake like this even if she was dead; when we were children, my mother kept chickens: I have seen them killed, their wings beating their sides long after their heads have been taken.
‘We should get her to her bed,’ Inna says. ‘We can secure her there. She’ll be fine when she wakes up.’ So Wallace carries Tobi past us all, and Lennox and Inna follow them. I pull myself along the rail behind. They are like swimmers. This is what it was likened to, in the early lessons. Push off, use your arms to steer and guide yourself, like rudders; use the environment to control your trajectory. That was the first lesson. I didn’t attend the others: there were better uses for my time. Hikaru cranes his neck and looks back from the cockpit section, and he asks how she is.
‘She’s okay,’ I say, and he nods. I feel as if I need to control this more. Otherwise, it could all be in danger of running away from me. We – they – strap her down, fastening her into the bed. Inna checks Tobi’s eye properly while she’s out, looking behind it, then scans her skull. We all stare at the results on the screens, and we’re relieved to hear that she’s clear. Inna tells us that it’s stress, pressure and stress that caused what happened, and nothing else. She opens the other beds up, and she floats above them.
‘This is as good a time as any,’ she says. ‘The rest of you should get some sleep as well. I’ll stay up with Hikaru, keep him company.’ She means: interview him. Take her time talking about who he is, how he feels about this mission. Check he’s okay, because now he might be the only pilot for a while.
‘I can stay awake as well,’ I say. ‘I’m not tired.’
‘Liar.’ She opens the lid of my bed and darkens the glass. ‘You need to sleep. You look like hell.’ That hurts, to hear her saying that. She leans in close to me, so that the others can’t hear. ‘If you truly didn’t sleep when we launched, you will need to now. Don’t argue with me, and go to bed.’ She takes my hand, or the end of my arm, and she drags me off the rail and towards the centre of the room. I let her.
‘Wake me if anything changes,’ I say.
‘We’re in the middle of nothingness, Mira. What’s going to change?’ I lie down and she links the magnets for me, then lowers the bed lid. She watches me until I can’t see her through the dark glass.
‘How long do I sleep for?’ I ask her, through the lid, but she doesn’t answer, and I can’t see out. I don’t like how little I can move in this thing. At home, I sleep on my side. It’s how I’m most comfortable: facing the wall, my back to the expanse of the room. Here, you are forced to lie on your back; and the hardness of the plastic now jars, it all seeming less comfortable than it could be; and the oxygen supply in these things runs slightly too cold. It regulates itself, because we didn’t want blankets or the opportunity to trap yourself in a sweatbox. It regulates itself: another way we have streamlined this whole process. Innovation through automation.
‘She’s forceful,’ Tomas says in my ear. I had forgotten that he was there.
‘I don’t need to sleep,’ I say.
‘Of course you do, Brother.’
‘You didn’t. You said you were going to bed, but then you were back again. You didn’t even leave.’
‘I did,’ he says. ‘I slept in the room here. Four hours, that’s all I need.’
‘Every night?’
‘Nowadays, sure. Sometimes it’s less. Sometimes more.’
‘Okay,’ I say. I think about talking to him more, but then it strikes me that he is already gone: that the slight hiss on the connection when he is listening to me is no longer there, and that in this bed I am all alone. So I talk to myself. We used to talk in bed, as children: every night before we went to sleep we would lie there, in the darkness, and we would go through what had happened. I don’t know when or why it began, but it was a habit. An addiction. It was something we always did. Our mother used to say that we jabbered ourselves to sleep. It wasn’t until we were sixteen and we moved into a new house in the city, away from the farm that we grew up on, that we were given separate rooms. I felt the space there, so I carried on talking into the darkness. It was only then that I realized it had always been that way. It wasn’t a conversation. We told each other what had happened, but we were actually talking to ourselves. Without him it was the same. I told myself what had happened, and I told myself what was going to happen on the next day. Look back, then peer forward. As an adult, speaking to myself, I pictured myself as a scientist, in a white coat, standing at the front delivering a lecture or a sermon. Increasingly, I could feel the pull of becoming somebody great. I wonder if he still does it now, with his baker lying next to him: if he mumbles to himself as I do, barely comprehensible but understandable by my own ears.
Here and now, I talk to myself. I tell myself what happened in the day that has just been, and before that, back to the last time I remember sleep as it is here: in a bed, and of my own volition.
4 (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
I sleep, and there are dreams, but I do not remember them. I suppose that’s better, sometimes: to not have that looseness concerning their reality. When I wake up, I forget where I am for a second, because I could be anywhere but here. I push the lid of the bed and it opens upwards, and I see that they are all crowded around Tobi’s bed: I can see the back of her head, and I can see Inna peering into her eye, shining a light in there. I am selfish. I worry about my own being first, checking myself before asking about her. The white spots in my vision are gone, but my gut still creaks, and my body hurts. I do not know how long I slept for, because there is only a constant darkness outside to judge it from, and there are no clocks visible from here. I unclip myself and push up, turning to look at them. Wallace is here looking at Tobi with Inna, and he nods at me in that way that comfortable men do: dipping his head, no smile on his face. This is my good morning.
‘How is she?’ I ask.
‘I’m fine,’ Tobi says. ‘Freaked out, maybe.’ She nods at Inna, who lifts a screen to Tobi’s face. It mirrors Tobi’s eye back at her. I can see it from here as well: the sclera completely red, the cornea and pupil a muddy brown, floating in the midst of the bloody mess. I can see Tobi struggle to hold it together, her eyelid twitching, but she manages. ‘How did it happen?’ she asks. Her voice sounds dulled and slow, and somehow using a slightly lower register than usual. Perhaps she is still sedated, or the effects are wearing off: I can imagine Inna wanting to ease her into this, in case the shock causes a relapse of whatever her fit before was.
‘It’s nothing to be scared of. Sometimes, bleeds can happen in the eye. They’re as full of veins as the rest of you, and they’re tiny. It was most likely the pressure up here.’ She says that as if there’s a direction. So curious: we call space Up, and yet we’re just as likely to be below where we started at any given time. Up makes it easier to understand, I suppose. ‘It’ll pass. I’ve checked that it’s nothing insidious, and it’s not. It’s just a bloody vein. Like a cut, but it shouldn’t even hurt. Does it hurt?’
‘No,’ Tobi says.
‘And it won’t affect your vision. It’s just a bleed. You’ll be fine, honestly.’
‘Just a bleed,’ Tobi repeats. She pulls on her cheek, pulling it down so that she can see as much of her eye as possible. She looks from left to right, and she blinks, as if that might suddenly fix it. ‘I thought I was dying,’ she says. According to her file she’s survived two plane crashes. Maybe that was different. She rolls the eye around, looking to see if the red ends anywhere. ‘Is it a bad one?’
‘It’s nothing,’ Inna says. ‘I’m more worried about the fitting. You’ve had that before?’
‘When I was younger,’ Tobi says.
‘It wasn’t on your records,’ Inna says.
‘It nearly stopped me getting into the air force. But I was tested. I was cleared.’
‘Must be the pressure up here,’ Inna says. ‘Don’t worry about it. We can keep it under control.’ She smiles at Tobi: this isn’t her fault. ‘I’ll be back,’ she says, and she leaves Tobi magnetically clipped to the bed. Inna pulls herself over to me, smiling, but I can tell that she doesn’t mean the curves at the edge of her mouth.
‘You slept well?’ she asks.
‘Fine,’ I say.
‘Sunspots gone?’
‘Gone,’ I tell her. I blink a few times, to check, but my vision’s clear. Tobi has taken my cross. ‘She’s okay?’
‘Did you know that she was ill when she was a child?’
‘No, Tomas did the medical checks. Wait,’ I say. I call him, but Simpson answers. He asks what’s wrong, and I tell him nothing. I tell him I’ll call back later, as if he is just down the road, as if this is all meaningless. ‘Is she okay? Can she perform her duties?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ Inna says. ‘But I didn’t have it logged. I am meant to know if there’s something could go wrong.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘Don’t you know any of the medical conditions on this ship?’ she asks.
‘Tomas did it all,’ I say again. ‘I focused on the technical side. I am more like that, I think.’ She is quiet. She looks into my eyes, examining me, checking that I’m okay. ‘My gut is still churning,’ I say.
‘You’re probably hungry,’ she says. ‘You should eat something. We’ve eaten without you. We thought we should leave you to sleep. We asked Tomas, and he agreed.’ I was cut out of the loop, I think. I was, for a second, useless to them.
‘Did you sleep as well?’ I ask. I don’t want to be the only one who is struggling. I want them all to be crumbling, and I will be the glue.
‘For a few hours,’ she says, but I think that she’s lying. I detach myself and she reaches out her hand. She pulls me to the side, to the bar, as if I need her help. I cling on, and try to stretch out – back pushed forward, feet pointed, arms reaching for the side. I wonder if I look as ungraceful as I feel. ‘You’ll get used to this,’ she says, meaning everything, not just the lack of gravity.
‘I’m no good at it,’ I say.
‘You’re getting there,’ she lies again. I wonder if it’s something she does a lot: professional falsity. Or, maybe, it’s something she does with me, to make me feel better. A happy leader is a successful leader.
‘I am useless. I have never been one of those people with balance.’ This hurts more than I thought it would, because I am tensing all my muscles. I let go of the side-rail and drift out, and I crane my whole body around, trying to turn. If I can turn I can control this better, I think. I see Tobi, still there on her bed. Her eye is as if she’s been shot. Wallace is with her, consoling her. He is making her laugh, or he is laughing and she is watching him, but she is moving on. Rallying herself. I get distracted, and suddenly I’m not near the rail. Inna’s hand grabs me and pulls me back.
‘Easy to get adrift. No walks until you’re steady with this, okay?’
‘Like you could stop me,’ I say.
‘Try me.’ I feel more stirring; my gut, my groin. My entire body, reaching out for something more than I currently have. I look away, towards the cockpit, where Hikaru is either still on duty or back on duty, and Lennox is keeping him company. They are not talking, though: instead they are running the tests. It’s constant, testing. This is the difference between our mission and whatever it was they were doing on the Ishiguro.
‘I should see if they’re all right,’ I tell Inna.
‘Want a push over there?’ She is playful with it, but I am too uneasy, still. I have no desire to make a fool of myself any more than I already have.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ll crawl.’ She pulls her hands back and swats them together, as if washing them clean of me, and she pushes off, back towards Tobi. She puts her hand on Tobi’s back to console her, and Tobi looks at her with her one bloody eye, and she pulls a face: resilient and powerful. I cling on for what feels like minutes, and then wonder if I can’t move on.
This is a mission. It has always been clear to us, to Tomas and myself, that it is, and that it should be treated with the utmost seriousness. It may not be glorious, not yet, but there has never been an actual mission to space. Before this, everything was simply to see if we could do it. It was a desire, a proving of ourselves as a collective people. Breaking Earth’s atmosphere? We can reach it. The moon? We can land on it. It was showing off, puffing out our chests, planting flags. This time, there is a reason to be here. The Ishiguro was the most selfish, vainglorious expedition. Dr Singer’s research was only an afterthought, a bonus thing that he could do while they were up there. It didn’t matter, because what mattered was how shiny the crew were, how beautiful, how unstable.
We have a task, and it’s hugely important. I look at the results of the anomaly while we are up here, and I think that we do not know what this is: that it is so far beyond our comprehension that this discovery, this mission, it could change everything. It could be the thing that realizes our position in the universe. People search their entire lives for an answer, and maybe this is it: maybe this anomaly might give us a clue as to our beginnings. It will not be showy, and it will not be glorious, but it might be an answer.
A scientist wants nothing more.
We spend the day running tests. One of the things that we can do, as we get closer to the anomaly, is to discover its span: to see how wide it is, what expanse of space it actually covers. We have measured it from Earth, of course, plotting the space that it doesn’t fill, but from here we can be exact. Accuracy is easier up close. Wallace and Lennox and myself establish the equipment and run the software. The ship will do everything once the programs start running. We have scanners on here, deep-range systems that will be able to search further than anyone has ever searched. It’s a grab bag, a huge potluck of whether you get anything useful or not. When the software is running, Wallace shows myself and Lennox how it works, even though I already know. I helped design it. There is a room dedicated to my work: the lab, I called it in the early days of development. A room off the corridor, opposite the changing rooms and the airlock, and small, but enough space for the screens that I will need. Above all it is somewhere quiet for me to work. When the software is running, both Wallace and Lennox go to get some sleep. I stay here alone and attach myself to the bench in front of the console. I bring up the screens: 3D visualizations of the results from the pings being sent out, a map of the area of space we’re charting being drawn and constructed in real-time, and I’m able to zoom and pan and focus and highlight it as much as I like. I see the outline of the anomaly starting to be drawn: a patch of nothingness amongst the stars in the distance, surrounded by space. I spin the scene with my fingers, look at it from every angle, and I call Tomas.
‘This is incredible,’ I say to him.
‘I know,’ he says. He has an exact replica of my screens on Earth, showing him real-time – or as close to real-time as the lag will allow – what I am looking at.
‘Did you know about Tobi?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t important, I didn’t think. It was a long time ago. We certainly didn’t expect it again.’
‘I would have thought it enough to not let her up here.’ I can trace each ping from here, and watch them: little orange dotted lines, pushing out like digital ticker-tape. They disappear, and another part of the anomaly is confirmed: an area of space that we cannot see, that barely exists. ‘But you made the call.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘She was the best person for the job. I don’t mind there being something wrong with you if you’re the best person for that particular job. I honestly never thought that it would be a problem, Mira.’ He is silent. I imagine him leaning over his computer, bent towards the screen, examining the visualization of this. Watching the pings that I watched fifteen seconds before, as the data reaches him. ‘You’ll have to deal with it.’
‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Is there anything else I need to know about any of the others?’
‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Would it matter if there was?’
‘What if she had died?’ I ask. An orange line flies past the anomaly and carries on into the distance: traced away, so small that I will never see it. The result of what it finds will return to us when it does: eventually it will stop. Maybe it will stop so far away that we will no longer even be receiving data when it sends itself back. That we, humanity, will no longer even be alive.
‘Well, she didn’t,’ Tomas says. ‘She is fine. Bruised and embarrassed, but she’s fine.’
‘Okay,’ I say. I spin the anomaly again. We have no way of knowing how deep it is, because we have to imagine that it is a wall, and there is no way of seeing what’s behind it. ‘Does it scare you?’ I ask. ‘This anomaly? Whatever it is.’ I wait for a reply, but one doesn’t come. ‘Are you there?’ I ask, but nobody answers, not even Simpson; which means that Tomas is still sitting at his desk, still at the computer, but he’s simply choosing to stay quiet.
I stay and watch the lines. This is such a process: like tracing the outline of a planet with the ends of strings of thread. Tomas and I wrote an algorithm to plot the pinging of this thing. The intention was, it would find likely areas and match them, following lines and trying to extrapolate the size of it that much faster. There is a game you play when you are children, Battleship: you pick a place that your opponent might have placed their ship, a number on a grid that you cannot see, and you hope that you will somehow pick the right space. If you do, you extrapolate the rest of the ship based on that: moving up or down or left or right, assuming the likely choice that they have made, hoping for another hit and to sink their ship. We played it a lot, Tomas and I. It was the perfect way for us to test how much we thought alike: how much we had to work to outfox the other. I imagine him, watching these with me, or slightly delayed; or maybe not. Maybe gone from the lab, finally heading home to his baker, to spend time with her. Forgetting about me, about this, about us, for an evening. Thinking of this as work, not what it actually is.
I switch the screens off. I don’t need to watch this. If he is still with me, so be it. I detach myself and push off, and I struggle at the ceiling, but then I push myself through to the corridor, and then down to the living quarters. The ship is quiet. Four of the bed lids are down and darkened, and only Tobi is still awake. I drag myself through, trying to make as little noise as possible, and she turns her head to watch me gracelessly approach. I settle in the seat next to her and clip myself in. She yawns and nods at me. I feel secure for a second. It’s nice, after the chaos of floating, to have this security. She is confident, and taking back control.
‘How long do you reckon we’ve been up here now?’ she asks. She puts her hand over the clock on the screen and looks at me. ‘No cheating, take a guess,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘See if you can guess. I couldn’t. I can’t tell if it’s only been a day, or if it’s longer. Everything becomes loose here, you know? Without the sunrise, without the sunset. Without defined bedtimes. And I feel tired all the time, whatever I’m doing. And that’s not my eye or whatever. Even just sitting here, that feels tiring.’ She turns back and looks at the screen, focusing on the expanse of nothing that’s in front of us. The view that offers precious little sensation that we’re even moving, so large is space and so small are we. She reveals the clock.
‘We should try to think of it in terms of hours here, hour to hour, rather than concentrating on the days. Back home, that’s where they need days,’ I say to her.
‘Yeah, maybe. Maybe.’ She yawns again. ‘But everything is looser. Time, speed, place. Everything. If you focus on a star you can see it move, if you stare at it. Or, you know, you can see us moving.’ I do as she says. I pick one – Algol, in Perseus – and I stare at it. I plot where it is in relation to the rest, and to the console and the frame of the window, and then I keep staring. Over time, and I have no idea how long that time is, it shifts, or we do. Such an infinitesimally small amount, barely perceptible. Barely registering. ‘It’s humbling, I think,’ Tobi says. ‘But at least we’re definitely moving.’
‘You walked away from two crashes,’ I say.
‘I did.’
‘Were you scared? How did you do it?’
‘What do you mean?’ she asks.
‘You were scared, with your eye,’ I say. She reaches up and touches it. ‘But back then.’
‘Well, now. See, I couldn’t do anything about the eye. If something had gone inside me, that’s not a thing I alter myself. If I was dying, not like I could change that. If I was dying then, that was it. Boom, dead.’ She rubs it, as if she can feel the wound. ‘With the crashes, that was in my own hands. All I could do was try to save myself.’
I stay sitting next to her. Neither of us talks after that.
Wallace, when he wakes up, asks me to go to the engines with him. He is proud of them. They are one of the few parts of the Lära that we avoided directly working on, once we had told him our brief. We helped him assemble his team and they designed them. There were stipulations – cost, consumption, having to work alongside the piezoelectric life-support systems – but they had carte blanche after that. He shows me them, because he wants my approval. He wants me to see how impressive they are, and how well they have worked. He waits by them, and he runs diagnostics. Now, they’re doing nothing: our plan is that we will not stop until we reach the anomaly, and we’re coasting off the momentum that we established with the initial acceleration. The boosters stop us accelerating any more – or, at least, stop us moving out of our allotted safety zone of acceleration – so, for the most part, the engines spin quietly. They are ready to stop us, when needed, but now he can run checks and tests, and, as he tells me, try to optimize them out here, to do real-world work on them that was impossible back on Earth.
‘It’s good,’ I tell him. ‘You do what you want to, okay? I trust you on this.’
‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘Appreciate it.’ But he doesn’t look away, and he doesn’t ready himself with work. ‘Look, I have a favour to ask,’ he says. ‘I’m missing my girls.’
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘Would it be all right if I called them?’ He has a wife and two daughters. They live in a house in Orlando. His wife is a teacher and his daughters are both at the school she now works at. I try to remember any other facts from his file. ‘It’s Karly’s birthday tomorrow. On the eighteenth. I just wanted to give her a call, say hello to them all.’
‘I, uh. Listen,’ I say. We have rules. They are allowed to pass on messages or have messages passed by Tomas or the ground crew, because that’s the only approval for bandwidth we have. He knows that. I don’t want to have to say it.
‘No, sure, it’s okay.’ He is saving me from having to. He is lost, for a second, not making eye contact with me. ‘I know, you let me, you’ll have to let them.’
‘You know how it is,’ I say. I cannot stand this. I cannot abide this conversation: not just the favour he’s asked, but the very being part of it. I want out. ‘I have to get back and check on the others,’ I say, and he nods, so I go. I move down the corridor and I leave him there by himself.
‘Problem?’ Tomas asks. He has been listening in. I want to tell him to stop, but we designed the system so that he could; so that, were it me down there, I could, if I wanted to. Complete mission parity. Completely open.
‘No,’ I say. ‘He’s lonely.’
‘Aren’t we all,’ Tomas says. I picture him with his baker. I do not say what I am thinking.
I want to sleep, but I cannot. I lie there and I think about what this means, and the pressure. There is always something coming, here. I have to be at my best, and that is my worry: if I do not sleep, I will function at some percentage of my absolute ability, and I could ruin everything. I get out of bed, and nobody is looking, and I contemplate staying awake; but there is another option. In the medical cupboard, the hypos with the sedative. We have so many shots, delivered in tiny liquid capsules which are then injected into the neck before dissolving; and they are harmless, non-addictive. Before, Inna administered them, but, I reason, how hard can it be? I am not scared of needles. Needles are a necessary evil. I load one into the hypo and try to find the spot she pushed it into my neck before, where there is still a pock-mark on the skin; and I hold the injector there and push the button. When I have done the first I make a choice: to take another, straight away. Two to settle me, to ensure that I am down. I inject it into the same spot; this one stings a little more. I get back to my bed and I begin to count, and I am gone. This works. This has really worked, and I can sleep, and be safe.
‘Wake up, Brother,’ Tomas says. ‘We’ve found something you’re going to want to see.’ He opens the bed for me, and I’m alone in the sleeping area. ‘Come to the lab,’ he says, which means it’s something related to the anomaly. He was meant to wake me first, before anything was announced, before any decisions were made. We were both meant to be there at the start of these things.
I have an erection, so I dress myself, pulling on the thick trousers designed to regulate our temperatures, and I desperately need to piss but that can wait, because I’ve obviously already missed something that he thinks is important. Down the corridor, all their voices coo as I float down, clinging to the bars. I think of myself as a trainee ballerina. Pointe. Demi something. Stupid. I should have been here.
I wonder if Tomas has done this on purpose.
One of the screens has been extended to fill the length of the wall, and they’re all peering at it. It looks like nothing at first; as if it’s been switched off. But then Inna turns to me, and smiles. She holds her hand out to usher me to the front.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she asks. I peer at it, and then I see it.
It’s the anomaly. I can’t tell the scale, so I shift the screen to a more scientific view – and they groan as the grid pulls itself over the image, a scientific sheen over this thing of natural beauty, but then I can see how far away it is, and still how large, even at this immense distance – and then I see the edges of it. It’s like a sheet of something that sits in the middle of the nothing: a pulled, taut sheet, where the corners and edges ripple like waves. And the texture – admittedly we’re far out, and this resolution, as much as we can see, isn’t going to be entirely trustworthy – but it’s like oil, somehow. It’s black, but not like the colour of space. Space isn’t true black. When you look at it, sure, that’s what it seems. But when you examine it, it’s got colour and light bouncing around inside it. It’s lit, and the blackness you can see is just a temporary absence of light. This is a different sort of black, painted or created, but I’ve never seen anything darker. I’ve never seen anything this pure before.
‘This is from the bounce?’ I ask. We have a chain of satellites between us and the anomaly. Tomas and I spent a year setting them up, sending them out and getting them roughly where we wanted them to be. They bounce visual data, downscaling it at each choke-point. The bounce is how I can talk to Tomas from here; and now we are finally close enough to see this in a resolution that lets us make out details.
‘It is,’ Tomas says. ‘We are finally close enough.’ Any chance of this being as incredible as I know it is – because it’s never been seen on a live feed, not like this; and that fact alone essentially means it’s never been truly seen full stop, as that’s how humans work – is diminished by seeing this last. It is, to me, like being told the ending at the start of the story.
‘We couldn’t sit on our hands while you slept,’ Tomas replies. I wonder how this reads to the rest of the crew. How antagonistic they think he is, or I am.
‘No,’ I say, but I can taste the lie in my own mouth, and feel myself brimming with anger. ‘Of course not. You were right to continue.’
‘We woke you up as soon as we were close enough to see this thing, and when we had processed the picture properly. We had to be sure.’ Of course you were sure. Of course you waited. I call up the readings from the ping, try to compare it to the pictures we have received from the satellites. The ping is working, giving us something resembling an edge, numbers, an outline. I examine the readings concerning the scale of it, the approximations of how large it is. I check the numbers against what’s in my head, and then call up the old measurements – Dr Singer’s best guesses, the estimates that he worked on his entire life. They are wrong, and I can tell that. It’s obvious to anybody even glancing at a comparison. While it’s possible that Dr Singer was wrong, it’s unlikely. ‘The scale of this thing,’ I say. ‘Were we off?’
‘It’s definitely larger,’ Tomas says. ‘It’s grown.’
‘Or it’s closer.’
‘Either way it’s closer, surely? Whether it has physically grown or hasn’t.’ He is explaining the basics of physics to me. I am grateful that he cannot see me.
‘How far away are we?’ I ask. I can hear the shake in my own voice.
‘Ten days,’ Tobi says. ‘Somewhere between ten and eleven. We’ll have an exact number of hours soon.’
‘That close?’
‘That close.’
I peer into it as much as I can. I know that Tomas will be doing the same: standing close enough to smell the holo-screen he has fitted down there, the vague waft of the chemical processes that give it capacitive abilities. He will be trying to find something else before I can. And to think: he said that he wasn’t jealous of my being up here, and him being down there.
The crew filter off, back to their jobs. Apart from Inna: she stays in the doorway. She leans back and becomes a sudden distraction: I notice her there. She leans back as far as she can. Almost like a stretch.
‘It’s incredible,’ she says.
‘It will be,’ I say. I wonder if Tomas is still listening. ‘Soon, we might know exactly what it is that we’re looking at. Then it will be truly incredible.’
‘That doesn’t change the fact of seeing it, does it?’
‘What?’ I try and soften the question, which I know comes out far too hard. ‘It has to change it, surely?’
‘Why?’
‘Because we don’t understand it. That’s human nature, isn’t it? To understand.’
‘Human nature’, she says, ‘is to be there and watch as everything unravels.’ She says it so lightly and gently, as if she’s leading me to a concept that I might not otherwise understand. ‘That’s what you’re really doing, isn’t it?’ she asks, and then she pushes away from the wall and pirouettes. I don’t understand what she’s saying. I don’t.
‘Wait,’ I say, but she has gone down the corridor, disappeared into the living quarters. I turn back to the screen and watch the anomaly: as the edge curls and the light runs down it. I try to find the beauty in it; I try to appreciate it for what it is. To see it as nothing more, not anything that runs deeper. It is something we do not understand, and that has to be appealing. We are here, and so is the anomaly, and it is as real as anything else I have ever seen. That has to be enough, I tell myself.
‘Careful,’ I hear Tomas say. I decide to not ask what he is talking about, and instead I pull the picture apart with my hands, zooming in as much as I can, until it’s a blurry black grain. There are specks in it: miniatures here and there. Nothing, probably: asteroids, detritus, scree. I make a note to myself to track them, to aid us plotting our course or in case they do anything interesting. I don’t say anything to Tomas about them, because then he’ll watch them as well, and that can be one more thing that he can keep from me, that he can let me sleep through. Instead they can be mine: something that I have discovered by myself.
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James Smythe
The stunning sequel to James Smythe’s critically acclaimed literary sci-fi novel The Explorer.TWENTY YEARS following the spacecraft Ishiguro’s disappearance, humanity is setting its sights on the heavens once more.Under the direction of two of the most brilliant minds science has ever seen – twin brothers Tomas and Mirakel Hyvönen – this space programme has been tasked with one of the most difficult missions in its history: to study what is being called ‘the anomaly’ – a vast blackness of space thought to be responsible for the loss of the Ishiguro.But as the anomaly tests Mira and the rest of the hand-picked crew’s sanity, Tomas will have to use all his ingenuity if he is to save his brother and their mission.
Copyright (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
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www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2014
Copyright © James Smythe 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs: © iStockphoto (astronaut). Shutterstock.com (http://www.Shutterstock.com) (background)
James Smythe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007456789
Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007456802
Version: 2014-12-10
Praise for The Anomaly Quartet: (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
‘Utterly gripping and highly original … explodes off the page’
Daily Mail
‘The Explorer has the dreamlike detachment of an Ishiguro novel … reminiscent of a 1970s space movie, where the darkness of the void mirrors the darkness of the human soul’
Financial Times
‘Beautifully written, creepy as hell. The Explorer is as clever in its unravelling as it is breathlessly claustrophobic’
Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls
‘A wonderful examination of coping with loss, time and death’
SFX
Contents
Cover (#ua3f18cbf-2e01-5091-a031-05609e689c4d)
Title Page (#ubb0a166e-cec9-5dd9-b70d-f88c142057e4)
Copyright
Praise
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part Three
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Here’s an exclusive extract from No Harm Can Come to A Good Man
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by James Smythe
About the Publisher
PART ONE (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
The scientist is not the person who gives the right answers; he’s the one who asks the right questions.
– Claude Lévi-Strauss
1 (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
The sense of pressure on us is immense. There is a feeling that if this fails – and if it were to fail it would be because of me and Tomas, and we are both far too acutely aware of that – but that if this fails, we might not try something like this again. I have seen the receipts for this project of ours. Tomas has signed off on them on my behalf, and we have decided that this is an endeavour that we should undertake. The weight of this endeavour falls onto our shoulders: his and mine. We are separated by only thirty minutes, and soon to be hundreds of thousands of miles. It feels like more already: because he is down there, in the comparative safety of his little bunker, dressed in his shirt and drinking his drink and smoking his cigarettes; and I am here, waiting to leave. I still find it hard to believe that I am the one going. We decided it, as with so many things in our life, on a game. The top bunk of our beds? The front seat of our mother’s car? Always on a game, because somehow that made it fair. If he won, he went to space; if I did, I was the lucky one. Maybe part of the reason that we both wanted it so much is only because the other one did.
But here I am. I am the one up here, and I will be the one going out there into the dark. Tomas has safety: of the lab, the bunker, the hotel that sits adjoining; and of a ground underneath his feet that will not rumble and shudder and shake, and that has no danger of tearing itself apart or falling out of the sky. And he has the girlfriend, the nice house, the nice car. In reality, it’s better that I am the brother who came up here. The only goodbye that I had to say was to him. We shook hands, which we have never ever done before.
I came up here with the crew yesterday. One of the things that Tomas and I decided, when we began this process, was that we would launch from the International Space Station. We decreed changes that would need to happen – the changes that transformed it into the New International Space Station, the same as the old but with what amounts to a loft conversion, a conservatory bolted onto the side, the prefix at the start of the name – and they all happened. Every single one. This is, for now, important. We are important. From here, I can see the planet we left. I have put marks on my window with black marker pen, just to check that we and it are moving as we should. But of course we are: how could we not be? And, on the other side, I can see the moon. I can see all of it. Now, here, I see Mare Fecunditatis and Langrenus. I know these features – a lake and a crater, essentially, named by gravitas and a Latin education rather than utility – almost by heart. I have studied them all my life.
I am worried. I cannot remember when I was last not worried, but that makes perfect sense. My mother once said, Man wasn’t meant to go into space. If he was meant to go into space, God would have made us all angels.
I feel better knowing that Tomas is on the ground, though. That he is watching over us. He is rooted, and that’s a nice feeling. If something goes wrong on the trip (which it will not, because we have covered every single eventuality, because we are those sort of people) he will be there to steer us home. He can override the controls, and there might be lag, there might be a delay, but he would get us home. I am comfortable in that knowledge. It makes me feel good; we have always steered each other.
I call him from the computer. It amazes me: how we can speak from here, with this distance between us. I understand the science completely, and yet. Sometimes I forget how rational this all is, and how explainable, and I revel in the magic. It gets me carried away.
‘You’re up early,’ he says. No platitudes or hellos. We have never had them. It has always been, Pick up where you left off. There is no need to pretend that you don’t know each other. ‘I’d have thought you would be sleeping still.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I didn’t sleep much at all, really.’ I do not sleep well. I never have.
‘It’s not like you won’t get the chance,’ he says. I switch the call to video, to see his face. He isn’t paying attention: I see the side of his head, cigarette in his mouth. He is looking at something off-screen. When he turns to the screen he notices me, and he grins. ‘How are you feeling about it?’
‘I am not exactly happy,’ I say. I am terrified of being put to sleep. The plan with the ship was that we would accelerate at a rate so much faster than we could from Earth, burning less fuel than if we had to break the atmosphere on this trip, less drag; and then we could coast. Constant acceleration, controlled by the ship itself. The ship has levels she can reach, speeds she cannot surpass, and we would control all that. Tomas and I, we are in control. But when we first move, the acceleration will be such that we will need to be asleep. We have constructed and designed beds that the crew can lie in to protect them, and we will be surrendering to chemicals to make it easier. I despise the idea: I have spent hours (by which I mean days, weeks, months of thought) looking into ways to make this part of the process easier for me. I have argued until I am blue in the face that I will stay there still and silent, and that it will be fine. Tomas has argued in turn that my body might not want to do what I tell it. He’s right, of course: there’s no way I could stand the pressure being put onto us. I would probably end up doing something – moving slightly, fidgeting – and getting myself killed. The concoction that we are using to induce sleep will also introduce a mild skeletal paralytic into our bodies, to ensure stillness and calm. It’s all part of the drive towards efficiency.
This is what Tomas and I offered to the committee with our plan: our sense of efficiency. Everything was to be different to the way that they did it last time. The last trip into space was twenty-three years ago, and they were a ruinous lot. They set us back decades, I believe. When they disappeared, never to be heard from again – as if space is a fairy story, something less than tangible – all funding went. Private investors, the life-line to the modern scientist, disappeared. Everything they did was wrong. I can pick holes. They launched from Earth, even though it made no sense, even back then. They spent money on automated systems because they believed they would add efficiency. They were wrong, as proven by their disappearance. They spent billions developing ridiculous gravity systems, something that the Russians prototyped back in the previous decade concerning gravitomagnetism. And why? So that they could rest! So that they could feel the sensation of a ground beneath their feet! They took a journalist with them, because they spun their mission into something commercial, something outside science. They took a man who didn’t serve a purpose with them on a mission that could have meant something. What did that cost them, that folly? They played everything badly, a product of moneymen rather than scientific design. It drove Tomas and myself insane. And when they went missing, the balloon deflated overnight. No more space travel. There is nothing new out there to find, and no glory to be garnered from dying in the cold expanse of space as they surely did. All the corporations involved distanced themselves, because that isn’t a visual that marketeers like: drink our cola as we spin out into the nothing. Most of us – scientists – felt as if they let us down. That’s a hard truth, but a truth nonetheless. When Tomas and I decided that we would do this, we decided that we would do everything better. This – space, discovery – it deserved better.
So I lie to Tomas now, and tell him that I am fine with the process. ‘It won’t matter to me,’ I say. ‘I will sleep and then I’ll wake up.’ He will know that I am lying, but this is what we do: it’s the way of twins, I suspect. ‘This is nothing worth worrying over. It’s only sleep.’
‘It’s not natural though, is it?’ I can hear him smirking as he prods. His voice and mine are exactly the same. The same tone and timbre, and when we speak English – which we do all the time, because somehow, over the last twenty years, it’s actually become easier to do it than revert back to a language that is now so close to dead it almost hurts to say the words – when we speak it, our accents are the same. We both got this from watching English-language television when we were children. We learned how to say words exactly the same way. American/English/Swedish. A curious hybrid. So we sound the same, and our mouths move the same way. Of course, we never used to hear it; it’s like when you listen to yourself on the radio, and you never sound as you expect. But now, after years of it, I can tell the sound of his smirk because it is the sound of mine. It has the same intonation, the same rise and fall. ‘So, listen to me,’ he says, ‘you’ll be fine. Nobody ever dies from sleeping in those things.’ He knows that somebody did, in the last trip. They woke up and the captain was dead, gone while he slept.
‘What do you want?’ I ask him.
‘You called me,’ he says. I don’t remember it being that way, but instead of arguing we discuss the breakdowns of the fuel delivery, which is still ongoing: reserve tanks being fitted, able to be connected via a channel that we can manually open if needed. The fuel is kept frozen – I mean, it’s far more complicated than that, but essentially – until it is needed, so that we can control its release perfectly, down to the last, ensuring that nothing is wasted. And frozen it’s compressed, meaning we can take more than we need, in theory. I sit at my computer while he talks and I cycle the cameras, so that I can see the ship: plugged in, docked to the NISS by rigid arms that we designed ourselves, that we had built, that we had installed. She doesn’t drift. She moves with us, like an appendage. There have been, over the past few days, people out there working on her. Checking her final systems, making sure that everything is as it should be. There is a crane arm attached to the NISS that was helping them, delivering the fuel and the provisions. Now, the crane is silent and still. There is only one man out there, on his own. I don’t know what he’s doing exactly. It will be logged somewhere, and I am intrigued, so I call up the spreadsheets and systems while Tomas talks, and I look for activity. The answer: he is cleaning the cameras. There are no exterior windows on the ship, only cameras, and he is cleaning them for us. Tomas can see what I am looking at, the computer screens and videos mirrored down there. Everything is parity.
‘I have thought it might be nice, you know,’ Tomas says, breaking his own chain of thought, changing the subject.
‘What?’
‘Doing that. Cleaning. Just something menial, you know? You’re still in space, but that’s like, I don’t know. It’s free, I think. Without this responsibility.’ He sounds almost wistful.
‘We’re privileged, Brother,’ I say. ‘We get to travel to the stars instead of waiting and watching them.’
‘You get to, you mean.’ We haven’t argued about our roles, not ever. He has always maintained that he is happy with the result: that he has his life down there, and he would have hated to leave it. I am alone, and still it remains so up here. ‘For me, it’s in the future. Another time.’ That was the deal we made. After this, if we run another, he goes up and I stay down. ‘This is good, though. Running things here, Mira: you wouldn’t believe the minutiae.’
‘I’m sure,’ I say.
‘But now you have what you wanted. I am happy for you, Brother. Relish it.’ So we both look out of the window, me here and him watching on a computer screen two hundred and fifty miles below in a part of Florida that seems as if it has only ever really existed for the purpose of launching humanity into space. Neither of us says goodbye. That’s how our conversations end, as they begin: one running into the other in a constant flow, as if no time has passed between us at all.
All of this was done before we came up here, the crew and myself. The ship was primarily constructed on Earth, then brought up for tweaks and reworking. The final layer of spit and polish. But we have only been up here a few days. We wanted to give our crew as much time on Earth as possible, as much time with their families. It’s a litany of ways that the last trip really messed these things up: they sent their people to space camp for months before. As if that would help! We relocated the families of the people that we wanted, the people that were best for the job, and we gave them houses and put their children in schools. We wanted them to have as much of their life as possible. A happy crew, Tomas has always maintained, is a positive and productive crew. Some of them have families: Hikaru Morgan, one of our pilots, has a newborn baby, only a few months old. By the time we return, she will be crawling. We have even paid the money to fast-track her, so maybe it’ll be more than crawling. Maybe talking. We wanted to make sure that they never resented us for taking them away, no matter how great the cause. Everything we have done has been to ensure that, yes, they are as efficient as possible.
I do not have a wife and children, or anything worth me missing. I am not well liked; I have no friends, no lovers. Tomas and I were nearly alone at our mother’s funeral, and it was only after she died that he began to look for women. I said to him, This is you seeking a way to replace her. He said, And so what? It’s better that I know that when I begin this. He found some women online, the sort of women he was looking for; the sort who were looking for the same thing as him. I told him that I couldn’t stand the thought of forcing myself to connect with people like that; that conventional wisdom, everything I have seen in my life, tells me that there needs to be something organic. He told me that saying that was an admission of how alone I was anyway, and how willing I was to stay that way. He said, A relationship forged on mutual desperation can absolutely work, because you both know that you are starting from rock bottom. You are both already as alone as each other. In this way he met his girlfriend, and they began dating. She moved in with him after I don’t know how many weeks. Far too few. She is a flake, and I don’t find her physically attractive, which makes me wonder if he really does. We have the same tastes in most other things, I know that. She doesn’t understand our work, also, which would be a barrier for me. She is a baker. She works in a bakery, and she understands cakes and breads. I sometimes think that she must find everything he says about our work so impressive because she cannot understand a word of it.
We have gathered the crew together for a meal, one last hurrah before we leave. I am uncomfortable with the lack of gravity: I am pitiably ungraceful, and I am forced to cling to the guide rails that have been installed. We have a system of magnetic carabiner clips that we developed to help us lock onto them, to keep us stable. They are all throughout the NISS, and they are all throughout the ship. Safety, efficiency: these are easy watchwords. The crew have all been told that today is free: no work. The safety checks are run by others. Today, they can talk to their loved ones, send messages, relax. The meal we have laid on is special: prepared by a chef from Earth, not freeze-dried and preserved, but something actually cooked for this occasion. He made it down there and we had it brought it up here on the last transport. We have champagne as well, and I pass out the boxes with the food in and the flasks with the alcohol.
‘Go easy,’ I say. ‘Remember that it will hit you like a wall, here. You don’t want a hangover for launch, do you?’ They laugh, and Wallace – actually Andy Wallace, but he likes to be called by his surname, as if he is constantly being ordered around – he mimes drinking it down in one. He even mimes the gulps, and he smirks. He is a funny guy. Not a practical joker, though, and usually dry with his humour, but he’s funny. ‘And remember,’ I say, ‘this is the last proper meal you’ll have for a while. After this, everything is vacuum packed or dried, okay?’ They groan, but really, it’s not an issue. The food that we have selected is fine for the purpose. We – Tomas and myself – have had control over every single aspect of this trip. The food, the way that the ship looks, the technology we have used inside it, the people that we hired. We made demands that the United Nations Space Agency initially balked at, but that’s the beauty of demands: they can cause a standstill until you get what you want. We insisted on extra fuel, because you cannot be too cautious where that is concerned. We insisted on the development of the proxy system, where Tomas can control the ship from the ground if needs be. Tomas developed the entire system, in fact, working hard on it from day one. We insisted on decent meals, privacy in the bed pods, the development of a far better communication bandwidth than had been previously afforded. We didn’t have to make many concessions either, because what were they going to do? We showed that we could bring the project in on time and on budget. And we were so up against the clock. That’s the crucial thing, I suppose: as soon as the anomaly became visible and on their radar, there was no way for them to back out. Something had to be done, and we would do it. So a huge amount of technology on the ship is ours, either developed by us, or in conjunction. We bought licences and patents and hired the people who would make what we needed. We made the ship exactly what it needs to be to do this mission. Anything less and we would be running so many risks, more than were acceptable, just as the Ishiguro did twenty-three years ago.
So I fluster and try to control myself, and I drift next to Wallace and I hold my flask up to clink it against his. He was chosen because he had a background on jets, which made sense. He used to work on the commercial atmosphere planes, and he was the one responsible for their fuel systems, their landing systems. He was the one who was developing the guidance proxy, meant to be able to be used to guide in planes in hazardous conditions, and to prevent terror attacks. We bought it, and him, because they will be invaluable. We may never use that particular aspect, but the fact that we have it and that it works is cause for such a sigh of relief.
On the other side of me, Tobi White. I am flanked by the Americans. She’s a pilot, absolutely the best that we could find. She flew as a teenager, taught by her father, who was a United States Air Force pilot, so she went that route herself when she could. Honours, all the rest. Top of her class. One tour of duty, injured – crashed, but survived – in Palestine, and we stepped in when she was healthy again. We had carte blanche to take whomever we wanted from the various armies and air forces, but we wanted the pilots to want it as well. We wanted everybody to see this as the opportunity that it is. What Tomas and I liked about Tobi is that she is driven by instinct. It’s innate and inside her: acting before she even knows what she’s doing. We liked that, and so we sought a balance with our other pilot, Hikaru. Asian by way of Wales, in the United Kingdom, and the single calmest man I have ever met. He is – and Tomas laughs at this cliché, always has done – but he is very zen. Something like that. He isn’t a Buddhist; instead, he follows one of the religions that sprang up in the last decade, one of those new ones designed to help organize your life, straighten out your way of thinking, promote productivity. It is not my business what you believe in or how you worship, only that you are good at your job. He eats nothing but white food, wears only white clothes. No pressure for us: we made sure that as many of the meal bars were bleached as possible, and he has his own supply. We are very accepting.
Next to him, my research assistant, Lennox Deng. He’s young and eager and irritating. Top of his year, I am told, although that means nothing to me. Tomas was top of our class, which leads to him believing that it’s a lofty achievement. I was third, but that was because I was attempting other things. I was pushing the envelope, trying to see further than just the research we were tasked with. Lennox, to me, is a follower, therefore. I see him as the sort of person who will do as I say because he wants to get the best report. Perhaps this is what you want from an assistant in a place like this. He is insistent and obsessed with the wonder of this endeavour, as a child might be. I am perhaps more practical now. Not that the stars are not magnificent, because they are: but I have seen them. I have spent my life looking at them. With this mission, perhaps there is a chance for something else? Answers, rather than wonder. What we will find out there might not be visually stunning, it might not be something that decorates a postcard, but it might be an answer to something. What is the question? Well, we don’t know that yet either. But Lennox: he is two birds with the one stone, a degree in engineering and a doctorate in astrophysics. Maybe he wasn’t my first choice, but he’s a sensible one. Besides which, it was an easy win I could give to Tomas.
Then there is our doctor, but she isn’t here yet. She is arriving tonight. She has been in last-minute training sessions, because she was a replacement. Our original doctor, some prick from Los Angeles, as they so often are, he bailed at the last minute. I said to Tomas that I could see it coming. He was that sort of person. We went through uniforms, training: millions of dollars spent on him, essentially. He kept asking questions about what happened on the Ishiguro, why it didn’t come back, and we kept saying, We don’t know, it just didn’t, but we have taken every precaution, blah blah blah. We told him, categorically, that it wouldn’t happen to us, but that didn’t make any difference in the end. He disappeared. So we went to the backup: Inna Gulansky. She’s amazing, really. She’s older than Tomas and myself by some years, and she’s been a field surgeon for most of her life. Tomas found her file, and I went with his choice, so that we could sign her off as quickly as possible. I didn’t question the choice once I saw her history. She was the doctor who came up to operate on the ISS last decade, so she’s already done zero-g triage, things that the guy she’s replacing could have only dreamed of. But her final stages of training have been happening without us, tucked away in some warehouse in Moscow, and that training prevented her coming up here with the rest of us. They wanted to ensure that she was absolutely ready. I have only met her a handful of times, but I can already tell that she will be an invaluable asset. I have told her, This will be an injury-free trip, that’s my decree, and she said, Well, why am I coming then? That is a good question! I said. She is full of good questions.
Now, here, when we’re nervous, everybody wants to talk with Tobi and Hikaru. She’s bright and bubbly, and she’s got so many stories about her life that it’s almost distracting; whereas he’s a picture of perfect calm, so much that it’s almost infectious. He tells us first about meditative techniques we can use when we are nervous about situations such as this, and then she tells a story about her father taking her up in a plane, about her first crash – her first landing where the plane didn’t survive but she walked away – when she was sixteen.
‘It’s all about knowing how to meet the ground,’ she says.
‘Not a lot of that where we’re going,’ Wallace says. His quip disarms her, throws her story off. She tilts her head at him and squints. She does that, I’ve noticed, when people make a joke at her expense. It rolls off. I seize the opportunity, the gap in the conversation. Tomas told me that I should make a speech to rouse them, to make sure that we’re all on the same page. I cough for attention, and I push slightly away from the wall, into the middle of the room. They all look at me. I do not know that I am much of a leader, but I am something. I am what they’ve got.
‘Hello,’ I begin, ‘I just wanted to say a few words. There will be more tomorrow, and the press will be involved, but this is just all of us, now. We have important work to be doing out there. Very important work.’ They are all smiling. Maybe they are just humouring me, because I know that I am bad at speeches, bad at all of this stuff. I know that I am not making eye contact with them; I am looking at my hands, at the paper that I wish I had to read from. I know all of this. ‘We all remember when they did this last. We remember how it all went wrong. But they were different, because they didn’t have you people as a crew.’ I have lost their smiles. I haven’t thought this through. I ask myself how Tomas would save this, and I remember the champagne substitute. I raise my flask. ‘So, you know,’ I say, and I start clapping my hand against the flask, ‘applaud yourselves! To us!’ I raise it high, and then I say it again. ‘To us!’ They all repeat it, and we all drink, and I see them looking at each other, little glances out of the sides of their eyes. I have fucked this up, I know.
I quietly mumble at them that I have to go and do some final checks, so I fluster to the rail, leaving my food but taking my flask, and I pull myself along and back to my room. It takes too long, and when I am there I fasten myself to the chair with the magnets and I call Tomas, and I swallow the remains of my drink back in one, sucking it through the little semi-permeable straw and feeling it spark and fizz on my tongue and the back of my throat.
‘Did you inspire them?’ he asks. He was listening, I am sure. Why would he not have been listening? So this is a lie, his asking me. It’s him giving me a chance.
‘I did my best,’ I say. ‘What are you doing?’
‘We’re watching projections of what could happen if it all goes wrong.’ I don’t ask him any more about them. I’ve seen the projections myself. We are sure that we will be fine; but in case we’re not, we have to run these things. They are terrifying, because there isn’t a single one in which any of the crew manage to survive.
The reason for this mission is to examine something that we do not understand. We know it as an anomaly. We first knew about the anomaly – and, by we, I mean the world – six years after the Ishiguro went missing. The world was not told about the anomaly at the time, and so when they disappeared and didn’t come back, it was a complete disaster. Tomas and I watched it on the news: the desperate wait for any sort of news from the lost shuttle. There were so many cameras in the launch centre, with the men and their computers and the branding everywhere. Showing endless, constant VT of the various astronauts as if they were participants in a reality show. Eventually the cameras packed up, and the news cycle was reduced to a small notice at the end that simply stated how many days they had been missing for. Everybody moved on. There was a funeral when it was decided that their fuel would have run out, that their life support would have disappeared. And then, after a while, they worked out where the ship must have dropped off the radar, and then later, they announced more details. A drip-feed of updates, holding things back when they were not ready for public consumption. Records from the ship’s journey; information from the journalist, useless and garbled.
Then one day the newly named UNSA announced that they knew of something, out there in space, out where the Ishiguro had been. The UNSA was little more than a conglomerate of companies and investors and governmental bodies plucked from the remnants of NASA and other space agencies, given a ridiculous name to seem important. They disclosed that the thing first appeared a decade before. There was patch of space that nobody could see properly: as if it was nothingness. It had been designated the catalogue number 250480 – they could only give it a number because nobody knew what it was. There were hundreds of thousands of these things up there somewhere: things that we didn’t understand, but that were catalogued with their little numbers and a file on a hard drive somewhere. It had been discovered before by Dr Gerhardt Singer, and he had been on the Ishiguro to try and learn more about it. It wasn’t important, that was the party line – that Inspire the world! bullshit was the primary reason for the launch of the Ishiguro – but it was clear that it was the important thing about their trip to him. He knew that there was a differential in the readings from it, simply because you could ping it and get nothing in return. The stars that used to be forthcoming, eventually, with their locations, he got nothing back from them. The anomaly was, as best every telescope could tell, nothing. There was nothing inside it. Nothing past it. And yet, it had to be something. Even a definite nothing is always a something. Dr Singer’s readings were correct, but they were brushed to one side as something to worry about another time.
When they announced the anomaly – and I say announced, but what I’m talking about is an update on a website, not a press release – they pointed out that they had singularly failed to get readings from the thing, because the probes that they sent to it malfunctioned. That didn’t mean anything: there’s a margin of error with anything technological. Two probes they sent, over a six-year period, both ostensibly to find the wreckage of the Ishiguro, but checking out the anomaly as they went, and they returned nothing, as if the thing wasn’t there. No readings: machines could not do what humans were needed for. And that’s where Tomas and I came in. We had worked with Dr Singer before he left, when we were students, in deep admiration of his work – of his role as an explorer – and we attempted to carry on his work, when we had the time. We were fuming after they spoke publicly about the anomaly, because they were denying that it was important. Tomas and I, we knew that it had something to do with the disappearance of the Ishiguro. Nothing is coincidence. Everything that happens anywhere happens with purpose and meaning. We went to the UNSA and we showed them our results, based on Dr Singer’s research. Extrapolations and summations, but with some immutable, incontestable facts: the anomaly was either moving or growing, because the space that it occupied was different. At that distance, it was hard to gauge almost infinitesimally small movements on that scale. But it was, one way or another, closer to us – to the Earth – than it had been when Dr Singer found it, and when the Ishiguro went out to examine it. It was moving. (Or, as Tomas surmised, unfolding. He has his own theories, and I have mine. We are not that similar; or, we try and cover all bases.) We plotted exactly where it was, using readings from every telescope and satellite available to us. When you concentrate and focus, you see the things that others miss. Stars that were registering as present from one satellite at any given point might not return a ping from Jodrell Bank. We focused on the anomaly, put our careers into it, our reputations. Tomas said, It’s better to be an expert in one thing that might be important than in many things that matter only a little bit.
The UNSA panicked then. They worried. More probes were sent, and they were lost as well. Everything there was lost. One of them, one of the people who approved the funding – he was the most desperate, his hands ready to sign funds to us before we even finished our first presentation – asked us what would happen if it reached the Earth. We said, We don’t even know what it is, yet. Let us find out. We showed them a map we’d made, and expressed in real terms the actual scale of what we were dealing with. They didn’t take long to reach the decision of a green light, on one condition: one of us would need to be up there, knowing what we were looking at. The other would stay at home and guide the operation from there.
One job sounded like what we had always wanted to do, the excitingly childish dream; the other somehow more prosaic role. Drier, certainly. We played for it. We have always played for it. Whoever won was going onto the ship, up into space, to the anomaly, the prize of this thing. It was decisive, my victory: I had fought for it, and I deserved it. I never gloated, because that wasn’t our way. We just got on with it. We planned the entirety of the trip meticulously. No room for error, and no error likely. Tomas framed the plan, seventeen printed A4 sheets of times and dates, and mounted it on the wall of our lab. I asked him why he framed it, and he said, It’s not going to change, so I might as well.
Our launch time has been set for over a year now. I look at my watch and I’ve got four hours. In two hours I have to report for duty, then I have to be sedated and strapped into my bed, and I will be made to sleep.
When it is time, we will all go into that darkness out there.
Tomas was first born, by three hours and forty-one minutes. I was if not a surprise, then a miracle, because they had no idea I was stuffed in there as well. The people who delivered me, who were not real doctors, started to tell my mother to rest rather than to keep pushing, because her job was done. Her baby, Tomas, had been born, and with that they assumed she was finished. My mother was a hippie, back when such a name meant something. She was into free love or whatever, and she was eighteen and had run away from home and lived on a reservation near these marshlands in Sweden and she didn’t believe in doctors. (We would argue, as she lay dying in the hospital bed that we forced her to lie in, that at least they fucking existed in the first place, so it wasn’t something she could contest. I don’t believe in them, or anything that they do, she told us, and we said, Well they’re real! And they could have saved your life! Instead of doctors, she believed in angels and psychic energies and trees that breathed at night.) Because of this lack of faith – a denial of scans and tests performed before she slid into her birthing pool and spread her thighs – she didn’t know that I was coming. I was a miracle. Tomas was abandoned, pushed to one side as they held me aloft. We are not equal, not completely. He has a birthmark stretched across half of his face, a wine stain that truly was there from birth. As she cradled him before I appeared, she apparently reasoned his mark away. It would clear itself up, was her logic. (A doctor might have told her differently, of course, but no.) When she finally held me, three hours after I began my climb out, she proclaimed me to be a mirakel: my looks, my health, my name. Mirakel – Mira, because I would never use that horrifying name, so gauche, a name that is such a product of who my mother was rather than anything resembling sense or logic, a name that would have lost me any respect within the scientific community – Hyvönen, brother of Tomas, son of Lära and some man who never existed, for all that I know of him. One of many people in a photograph of hundreds, drunk at some festival or other. I am the product of my mother’s loose virtues, and I am a scientist.
The names were competition for us, as she didn’t change my brother’s name to something more impressive; so he had to prove himself. He was older, wiser, in theory, and he shrugged it off in what he said and how he acted. Not underneath. Underneath, as we raced each other through school – excelling in the logical subjects, with proper results reliant on knowledge and skill and being able to use your brain, and thus attain results that could be gauged, pitted against each other – then university, and doctorates, neck and neck the whole time, I was still the mirakel. I would still be there second but more perfect, and his face bore that scar the whole time. Not a scar, no, that’s unfair: in my darkest moments, as we fought, that’s what I would call it. It’s a mark. It singles him out. It allows people to tell us apart, as otherwise we would be identical, monozygotic. We are in our forties now, and tired. Both of us are tired. And this trip, this excursion, it’s our dream. When we stopped fighting, we joined forces. When we stop competing, we’re unstoppable.
I’m the second to arrive at the gateway to the Lära. It was in our contract that we could name the ship, that Tomas and I would be able to choose what we would call it by ourselves. Her name is a word that means a theory, like a scientific supposition; and it was also our mother’s name. It seemed appropriate: taken from the centuries-old tradition of naming ships after women. Gods or women, that’s how you named a ship – never mind that the Ishiguro broke those traditions, celebrating the engineer who designed the engines.
Wallace is already here. He’s leaning against the wall, and he looks weary. I can’t blame him. He looks at me and nods. He will have just said his goodbyes to his family, and I assume that he would like it to stay quiet for a while longer; I don’t have an issue with that. From the windows here, I can see the hull. I can see the panels, the bolts and fixtures holding them to each other. I know how they’re held in place, and what’s under each one. The design of this ship is entirely our own. We built this for practicality. There is a reason that spaceships look like they do. With the Ishiguro, that was just another in their colossal series of egomaniacal fuck-ups. They built a ship that looked like something from a film, that had no place being in space. It was built for its toyetic qualities, the design licensed out before they even took off; ours has been constructed to work perfectly, efficiently. To actually serve its purpose.
From here, down the tunnel, is an airlock. The other side of it leads you to a changing room, outfitted with benches and suits for exterior walks. One room off that is the bathroom, of our own design. Nobody likes shitting into a suction tube, I told Tomas, but that’s what has to happen. Might as well make it as comfortable as possible. So it’s a pod, and there’s a seat, and there’s a vacuum seal around your ass made by the seat, which is of a jelly, almost, malleable. It fits to you. There is no hose or inverted gas mask. No good for urination, though, so that’s still into a funnel, but that’s easier to deal with. The shower uses a vacuum as well, pulling through a grate at the bottom, and the water is pressure-pushed from the top. In theory, on a good day, it’s like a waterfall or a car wash, fast and hard and maybe not very pleasant, but it’ll get you clean.
Through from there is the bedroom, which has the beds set at a 40-degree angle off the floor, arranged around each other in a circle. We paid for a special darkening finish on the glass, which goes black on both sides, blocking light if you want, because it means that people can sleep while others work. No need to have lights out, or bedtime. This doubles as our sick bay as well, in case. Through from there is our living quarters, and at the neck of that room the cockpit, all built into one area. Less space than our predecessor, but theirs was extravagant. We’ve reserved more room for the essentials – fuel, food, the communications system that we had built – and taken away space for play. Tomas and I both agreed that it was unnecessary. The cockpit is state of the art. In the old Apollo spacecraft, they had open panels, hundreds of buttons. Every part of the process had to be performed under a strict regimen, an order in which things had to be done. They were suffering a basic lack of understanding of automated processes, but that is a hobby of mine. Ergo, we have tried to make this easier but still retain the functionality. We have cut down on what can go wrong, that’s all. A lot is controlled by computer – life support, air supply, fuel intake – but we can take control back if we need to. We can do it from here, and Tomas can do it from Earth. That’s thanks to the communications system, and how we’ve managed to get the signal to carry enough data, relaying it with satellites. Back in the Ishiguro’s day, such an undertaking would probably have been impossible. We haven’t had a chance to test it, not outside of satellite commands, but that’s always the way with new technologies. So much of it is theoretical until it suddenly works and you’re proven correct.
Hikaru is next to arrive, and he is grinning.
‘This is exciting,’ he says. We have a special cupboard of food especially for him, of white bars of soya and tofu and processed chicken. He’s not fussy about drink colour, apparently: just the food. Tobi and Lennox arrive together, and with them is Inna. Tobi pulls herself to the side and waves her hand out, allowing Inna past, as if this is some sort of formal greeting. Everybody smiles and greets her. They’ve all met her before, but only briefly, when she wasn’t originally a part of this team. Bonding was low on the list of our desired achievables before launch; far lower than making sure that she was ready for this challenge.
‘Hello,’ she says. She shakes our hands, reintroducing herself. None of us have forgotten her name, because she’s vital to this, and because we’ve all been talking about when she would join us.
‘Great to have you,’ Hikaru says. ‘You as excited as we are?’
‘Just about,’ she says. Her accent is curious. She’s from Georgia – Soviet, not American – but lived in England for most of her life. Her voice is very soft, only giving a hint of its origins on her Rs. She’s ten years older than Andy and myself, and in better physical shape than almost anybody else here, which is really saying something. Not sure how much of it is tinkered. ‘Can’t pretend that I’m not nervous,’ she says. She stretches the letters out, then the whole word. It sounds different, almost alien in its delivery. My own accent has been softened and lost if it was ever there in the first place; the rise and fall of my own language washed out. Hers is still there, and still prominent. Nerrrvous, she says, or it sounds.
‘You’d be crazy if you weren’t, I reckon,’ says Tobi.
I feel sick, and this feels loose. Wrong. I need to speak with Tomas one last time. I can feel the lack of gravity inside me. My guts, swollen up and churning, and like the slightest movement could upset me, could end this for me. I back away from them all, down the corridor, around the corner, and I open a connection and whisper at him that I need to hear his voice.
‘What’s wrong now?’ Tomas asks.
‘Are you sure we’ve done everything we can?’
‘Have a safe flight, Brother,’ he replies – he calls it a flight, which sounds so demeaning for what this actually is – and I hear the click of him cancelling the connection. Over the speaker system, the launch crew announce that they are opening up the airlock entrance. We’re boarding.
2 (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
Every part of this process has been designed to ensure that nothing can go wrong. I cannot stress that enough: the level of control that we have enacted on this entire operation. Entry to the Lära is as controlled as everything else. There is no room for error. Everything must be checked, processed, run through before we are allowed on. There are exacting checklists full of bullet points that take days to tick off. It’s these things that can mean the difference between life and death. This is how the systems can be guaranteed to work when we need them to, how we can streamline them and make them user friendly while still retaining the safety: they are prepared and perfected, and instigated with absolute care and diligence.
‘Are we getting on anytime soon?’ Tobi asks. She looks at the clock on the wall. Less than half an hour until we leave. Sedation takes only a few minutes to completely set in; the paralysis less. We don’t control the boarding process from the ship: we are nothing but passengers for now.
‘Not long,’ I say. I am running through their final checks in my head, and as I reach the final one, the door opens. It slides satisfyingly and the launch crew inside the ship move backwards, grinning. They’ve got balloons and a banner, both hanging in the middle of the air. My crew laughs, almost hysterically. Bon Voyage, the banner says. From the moon to the stars, under it in smaller type. They applaud, and we applaud them. We walk through to the corridor in single file as the ground crew start pulling aside the decorations, and we all find the bed labelled with our names. (I pretend to not know which one is mine, even though I dictated where the beds lie. I arranged them, like chess pieces.)
‘I want to go last,’ I say to Inna. She nods.
‘You’re nervous?’ Nerrrvous.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ve been sedated before. Nothing to be scared of.’
‘Good,’ she says. ‘I always think it takes better the less wary you are.’ She preps her injections. She clicks the first one in, a bullet into the hypo’s chamber. I catch a glimpse of a mark – a tattoo, I think – on her collarbone as she moves, as the fabric of her shirt pulls away, but not enough to see what it is. I wonder what it is of. I wonder how big it is. ‘Who’s first?’ she asks the group. Hikaru raises his arm, and, in one motion, starts to roll up his sleeve. ‘Neck,’ Inna says. ‘It’s better there. It takes faster.’ He shrugs and lies back on the bed. The magnets click in, holding him in place, and she folds herself down a little to reach him. The hypo seems to fizz as it empties the contents of the pod into him. He winces, and then shudders, shaking the injection off.
‘Nothing to it,’ he says. The others line up one by one, and they all act as if it’s nothing, but I see in their hands the mild tremble of fear at the injection itself; or, maybe, at the thought of being asleep and not being in control. I never used to drink, for that loss; I never used to take painkillers, for the same. Tobi goes first, then Lennox, then Wallace, and then Inna turns to me. ‘You next,’ she says.
‘One second,’ I say, as she readies the hypo. I pull myself to the cockpit and open a connection to Tomas. ‘Can you hear me?’ I ask him.
‘What is it?’ Tomas sounds annoyed at the sound of my voice. I know how busy he must be. I speak quietly, and turn away from the rest of the crew. I don’t want anybody to see that I’m worried.
‘Is everything okay?’
‘It’s fine. Why would it be anything other than okay?’
‘I just wanted to check.’
‘You think that I would let the launch happen if everything wasn’t okay?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘I have work to do, Mira.’ And then he’s gone. I turn back to Inna, who’s waiting. ‘Let me get into the bed,’ I say. ‘Do it there.’ I am next to the central controls on one side, with Inna on the other.
‘You can’t,’ she says. ‘You have to do me after I’ve done you.’ I nod and sit on the edge of the bed, unbuttoning the top of my shirt, and I pull it down to show the part she needs. She leans in: I feel the press of the needle. Like a bore, followed by the break of the skin, and the liquid. That’s the worst part: feeling it rushing inside of you, something where it should not be, mingling. It hurts for a second, nothing more. ‘It’ll only be a couple of minutes before you feel it,’ she says, and she pulls her top to one side and exposes the tattoo again. I can see more of it: the head of a bird, blue and yellow, eyes wide, mouth open. An eagle’s beak. It seems to run lower, towards her chest itself. She puts the capsule in and then hands me the hypo, and points with her finger to where I should place the nib.
‘Ready?’ I ask.
‘Of course,’ she says. The hypo rests against the peak of the bird’s head. I press the button and she barely reacts; I pull it away. She folds her top back up. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘time for sleep.’ She swings her body round into the bed and I hear the hiss of the magnets. ‘They lower the doors for us?’ she asks.
‘They will, but you can do it yourself if you want.’ I glance over at the others, their frontages still up. ‘Sleep well, everybody,’ I say. They murmur; they’re already under. It hits you like you don’t know it’s coming, and you’re suddenly elsewhere, in total darkness. It’s brutal, how fast it is. Inna lies back.
‘See you when we wake up,’ she says. She reaches for the lid; her touch alone makes it descend, bringing it down around her. The glass darkens as it lowers. I flatten myself against the bed as well, and I fasten the magnets, and I try to stay still, because I am still not used to this; the feeling of never being flat, of never being orientated one way over the other. I rest my head on the bed, snug inside the plastic form that’s been moulded around our individual physical shapes. I wait until a click comes over the intercom, and I hear Tomas’ voice.
‘This is the first milestone on the road to the stars,’ Tomas says. ‘Beds closing in five. Four.’ He finishes the countdown and the glass slides down and seals me in. Enough air to breathe, to sustain, that’s the deal. When you sleep you naturally need less. Your body rights itself, puts itself into a state of optimum intake. It aids the depth of your sleep as well, having less air. I shut my eyes and wait for sleep to take me. I know that it cannot be long now.
I hear the engines kick in, and the rumble that they send throughout the entire ship. For that second, it feels like an explosion. I hear the joining door being retracted, and the order that it be so, and I hear Tomas’ voice over the intercom telling the ground crew to prepare for launch. I keep my eyes shut and think about the path we’re going to take, and how the launch will look. We’ve run so many simulations – and a simulation was how we knew to launch from the NISS in the first place, how the money saved on building an extension here to do it was proven to be the right choice by another simulation – and I can see them all running at the same time.
When I used to fly in airplanes I would shut my eyes for a second as we took off and picture the plane exploding, bursting into flame. They say that if a plane is going to crash, it’s statistically most likely to happen as it takes off. I figured that if I got past that I was pretty safe. I imagine this ship exploding. I imagine the pieces floating all around me in space. I imagine me floating amongst them.
Tomas does the other checks, his voice talking through every stage, and I start to wonder why I’m not asleep yet. I should be, by now. This is crucial. Sometimes people need a few minutes to really let the sedative sink in, I remind myself. Sometimes the body’s natural adrenalin, the endorphins, they need longer to be counteracted and swallowed by the sleep. But then: now I am worrying that I am not asleep. In my life I have insomnia, I suppose, of a sort: when pressure mounts and the following day carries any sort of importance, I will worry all night, worry that I am not going to achieve the required amount of sleep to function at an optimum the following day. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the worry is then the thing that conspires to keep me awake, rolling around in my head in circular patterns that never stop looping in on themselves. Only when I have given up all hope do I stand a chance of actually falling asleep: when I have managed to pass that point, to realize that there is nothing I can do now, and that the day I was so worried about is likely ruined. It is a hindrance; a horror. I sleep so badly, because almost every day carries that pressure. Tablets do not help, not really: all they do is render me more tired than I would ordinarily be when I awake. Eventually nature takes over and I sleep: but it is fitful, and it is not what I want. This injection: this is to be my salvation for this leg of the journey. After this, I will worry about it as and when.
I cannot see a clock from here. There’s nothing. That’s an oversight, and I should have thought about that. There are no microphones in the beds either, another oversight. It’s to protect the seal: the fewer holes there are, the less chance of there being a crack. The pilot on the Ishiguro died before they even woke up, probably because of a gap in the seal, something like that. So we were cautious. It’ll settle in. I’ll sleep soon, because this is medically controlled. This is something I cannot avoid. On occasions, when I have been at my most desperate for sleep, I have taken painkillers: something strong enough to dull everything else, to remove my faculties from worrying about the sleep itself. This is like a better version of them: unavoidable, inevitable.
‘Launch crew prepare,’ I hear through the ship. You can’t open the beds from the inside once they’ve been sealed. If you could, you could accidentally do it, and there’s nothing worse than that thought. The speeds that the ship will reach as it pushes off from the NISS – free of the trappings of any real gravitational pull, free of the resistance offered by an atmosphere – are so ridiculously powerful that they could – or would – damage the human body. Our bones, our bodies, they are not strong enough. The beds are pressure sealed to provide an environment that the body can cope with. They create their own pressure level inside them; protect the crew from the g forces. It’s another of mine and Tomas’ innovations. Another way that we are making this expedition work. If any of the crew were to be out of their beds – and the controlled environment created therein – they would likely die. Their body would be found pulverized, as if it had been beaten to death. But I am not loose. I am in here, awake. I don’t know if this is dangerous. I cannot think about how dangerous this is. I shout.
‘Help,’ I shout, ‘I am not asleep yet!’ I call Inna’s name, hoping that I’ll see her descend and open my bed, and inject me again, triple-strength, able to level me to slumber while this flight happens. I was always scared of flying as well: of seeing the Earth get smaller underneath me. Not like I will see it from space, that doesn’t faze me, because you can see everything in one go: more the sensation of suddenly glimpsing people as specks, and cars as ants, and then everything smaller and smaller, houses like dust, and then whole towns. But Inna doesn’t come, and everything is dark, soundtracked by the rumble of the engines proper: through everything, right through the hull. Everything underneath me feels like vibration, nothing else. I feel my bones rattle, and my teeth in my jaw. ‘I should be asleep!’ I shout, but my voice dulls itself against the inside of my bed, and against the growling of the ship, and against the paralytic. My words slurred.
The engines fire for launch in three phases. First phase is a warm-up, bringing the temperature of the engines up to the necessary point. The second phase – the phase that I feel kick in through the rumble, like a foot on a gas pedal while the handbrake remains pulled on – adds the injectant and coolant into the burner, readying to add it to the engines themselves. ‘Please,’ I hear myself say – an echo through the rumble – and then the third phase.
‘Countdown time,’ Tomas says. He goes through the numbers, twenty to one. I brace myself. I don’t know what will happen. Why did we have to be asleep for this part of the launch? Because it made sense. Because we were liable to panic. Because the vibrations of the ship would be so violent that we weren’t to struggle against them. I have always hated sleep. Not been afraid of it, that’s wrong, but felt it a waste. Tomas slept less than I did, and he would play pranks on me as I overslept, as I lazed about; but it’s more than that. He would have achieved so much by the time that I woke up. He would have done things. Found things. Now, he’s meant to be awake and guiding me, and I’m meant to be asleep, and letting him, but I’m not. I want to be. I don’t want to die, here. I don’t want to be shaken apart. I tell myself not to struggle. I have the self-control to do this, I tell myself. I say it aloud; or I think that I do.
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 (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
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.’
‘There. Wallace said something,’ Hikaru says to Tobi. ‘Now we eat?’
‘You know what I mean,’ Tobi says. ‘This is pretty big, right? Being up here?’ They all look to me. ‘This must be one of the best feelings, to see this actually happen. To come to fruition.’
‘It’s good,’ I say. I don’t tell them that my insides are tumbling and churning, and that I can’t balance, and that there’s still these fucking white spots blinking in my peripheral vision. I don’t tell them all that I think I was awake during the acceleration. I try to be inspiring. ‘We’ve got a huge challenge ahead of us, and we’ve got a long way to go. Lesser journeys have destroyed people. You have to remember what we’re here for.’ They’re silent. I pause: feeling sick. As if having my mouth open might be my undoing. They’re waiting, and I can feel the churn, and I think that I have nothing else to say. But then I hear a voice the same as mine pick up where I left off:
‘This isn’t something for your CVs, or to tell your grandchildren. This is a mission for the whole human race. There’s something out there, and it’s our job to find out what it is. This isn’t exploration: it’s discovery. It’s potentially finding the next important thing to push humanity forward. This is Columbus returning to the New World, going back there and saying, This is mine. I found this. Now I’m going to fucking start something.’
I had no idea that Tomas was still there, and listening. He said he was going home, but he didn’t. And he doesn’t say goodbye; he just falls silent. Tobi unclips and opens a cupboard at the side and brings out a box of meal bars.
‘Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub,’ she says.
We worked for the UNSA back before that was what it was even called. Back then it was still a collection of companies and ex-DARPA employees trying to put something new together. We wrote a letter and we spent a summer halfway across the world, suddenly in America, and interning for Gerhardt Singer. It was the summer before he went up in the Ishiguro and never came back. Afterwards, we wrote a letter to his partner saying how honoured we were to have met him, to have studied under him. The things that he taught us. I think that’s why we started research into the areas that we did, to carry on his work. (We didn’t tell him that we thought he played it wrong, and took too many chances. That would have been cruel, I think: he was hampered, and it was not all his fault, the choices that were made.) Dr Singer said to us, before we left him at the end of the summer, that the anomaly was his pet project.
You pick something and stick with it, he had told us. Because, if you focus, there’s a chance that it will be important. Some scientists spread themselves too thin, you know? They try lots of different things, go from pillar to post, and they never settle on the one thing. I think it’s better to have something that’s my life’s work – that might be important – than just generalize and leave nothing. He seemed really sad when he spoke about it, as if he might go his whole life and not discover anything. As it turned out, he died, and we don’t know if he ever discovered what the anomaly was. That seems such an inglorious way to go: out here, in the emptiness, still asking that question you have always asked and never being able to get an answer.
Inna comes to see me as I sit by myself above the expanse. There is a screen embedded in the floor. When we were young, our mother took us on holiday to Greece, and we went in a boat with a glass floor, and we could see right down into the ocean, and we could see the fish and the water, how deep it was. When we were designing, we took that concept and adapted it. We fitted a camera into the underside-exterior of the ship, and we layered a screen into the floor that could show that camera’s feed. Tomas was so excited by the idea. Think about it! he said. It’ll be incredible, to be up there, nothing underneath you. It’ll be like you’re floating. It wasn’t meant to be me, that You, I suspect: I suspect he thought it would be him. He wanted to have it constantly on, a constant hole to space. I said that not everybody would want to see that all the time, want to see that nothingness. He said, There’ll be stars, and I said, Well, they don’t count for that much when they’re that far away. I have seen stars every day from right here. He argued at one point that it should be glass, even: a clear, unfiltered view. I told him that was stupid. There was more chance of something going wrong. Everything that could have been a window is now a screen, linked to an external camera. We took all glass out because it was easier. It meant fewer seals, and less chance of anything going wrong under the pressure we would be exerting.
Now I can sit here and look down and see everything. I’ve called up the trackers, and computer visualizations dart across the glass, highlighting planets and galaxies. They trace comets. They assign names, and they tell me distances that can never – or not in my lifetime, not in this craft and with this crew – be reached. But it makes it look as though the galaxy is somehow that much closer. Somehow almost attainable. Inna stares at the same things that I do, circling around me. She puts her hand onto my shoulder, to steady herself. The skin on her hands – all over her, in fact – it looks younger than she actually is. I wonder if she’s had work done. Everybody has; I would not judge her. It would be sensible, probably. It’s so hard to tell nowadays. If we didn’t have everybody’s details, I wouldn’t put her as older than me, not really. But then, I don’t know if I even look my age. I call up details for the screen for what we’re looking at: the age of the stars we’re travelling past at such speed. It’s guesswork aided by supposition, but some of them – based on their brightness, their distance – some of them we’re pretty accurate on, I think.
‘It’s wonderful,’ Inna says. ‘This is something I never even dreamed that I’d get to see.’ I don’t know if this is her way of thanking me for putting her on this trip. She wrote Tomas and me a letter with her application, talking about how excited she would be. How, when she was a girl, she had always dreamed of this, just as Tomas and I had. That’s how you appeal to us: you say, I am just like you. I understand you and what you are trying to do.
‘Aren’t you scared?’ I ask her. She shakes her head.
‘Not now we are up here. Not in the least.’ She dips the tip of her foot at the screen, stretching forward. It focuses on the star nearest her toe-point, and details that system. The name of it, how far it is, when we first logged it as a race. And then it tells how long it would take to get there. She looks at the number, which extends well beyond our lifetimes, and she laughs. ‘That’s why I’m not scared,’ she says. ‘You look at this, it’s easy to see how big it all is. Much bigger than us. Time is something we have such a limited supply of, and I’d rather do something important with what I have got left.’ Everybody wants glory, I do not say to her. It’s embedded inside us, entrenched deep down as part of what makes us human. Tomas joked, after we spoke to her the first time, that I was attracted to Inna. He said that I was, and I protested, but he is that way. He will drive a point home, and he will insist, because he always believes that he is right. You don’t have a chance, he told me, because she has lived, and she has done so much. She’s so worldly, and look at us. We don’t have a world: we have a laboratory. I said to him, You’ve found somebody, and he said, No, we found each other. It’s a two-way situation, Mira. She’s a baker: her kitchen is as much of a lab as ours is. ‘Do you feel pressure?’ Inna asks me. ‘Do you feel that this is somehow harder, because of what has come before?’ The last successful space flight was nearly four decades ago. We’re fighting against the odds.
‘I don’t get pre-occupied with it,’ I say.
‘But it’s there, isn’t it? Hanging over our heads.’
‘I suppose,’ I say.
‘Like the sword of Damocles.’
‘Yes.’ I turn to her. My own foot brushes the screen-floor, and selects a series of planets, sending the data presented into a whirl. ‘I try to not worry about these things. We have made this as foolproof as it can be. But then, we fools can try and test that.’ I smile. I look for a reaction in her face, to my joke. I am trying these things: I have seen Tomas do them, make jokes and win people that way. He has always been better at that stuff than I have. I am trying.
‘It’s normal that you would be worried,’ she says. ‘You have to remember: there’s no pressure to succeed. We do the best we can do.’ I realize that this isn’t the talk that I thought it was. She isn’t impressed by me. She is professional. Her timetable says that she will perform Day One psychiatric evaluations of us. This is mine. I feel everything sink inside me. The ache in my insides, that I had forgotten about, it comes back. I do not know what to say to her.
Then I am saved: a shout comes from the back of the ship. It’s Wallace’s voice, a howl for help, and Inna unclips herself and races off, pushing off with her feet like a swimmer, shooting down the corridor. I fumble with the magnets holding my glove to the rail, and as soon as I am away from the wall I feel myself rock. I feel the bile inside, even through the pills that Inna gave me. I steady myself. I shut my eyes, and I see the white glimmers, the pulsing in my own eyelids.
‘The sword of Damocles – you know that she used it wrong, don’t you?’ Tomas is speaking to me again.
‘Yes’ I say. Of course I know that. He knows that I know it. ‘You’re back,’ I say, changing the subject. ‘Did you sleep?’ It doesn’t seem as if it can have been long enough. Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps he couldn’t sleep. He ignores my question.
‘People just use it to describe any old situation where there’s pressure or what have you. But Damocles took the king’s place, and then he was the only one on the throne. That’s the point of the story: if you’re not king, you don’t sit on the throne, and the sword will never hurt you.’ I know what he’s going to say, because he’s a fucking shit. ‘We’re the kings here, Mira. She can say it’s hanging over all of them, but you know it’s not.’
‘I know the point of the bloody story,’ I snap. I shut my eyes and I try to breathe more. He hears me, through the earpiece. I pull myself along the railing to the side, and then around the corner, past the table and to the corridor hatch. Tomas is quiet then, and I don’t talk to him any more either, but I know he’s still listening to everything we are saying. Nothing will slip past him.
Down the corridor, they are all shouting, and I cannot tell what is wrong through the noise. I am the last one to respond, the slowest. I breathe. I try to breathe.
Tobi is pressed against the floor, being held down by Wallace, and Inna is grabbing at her arms as they flap around. She is convulsing, and she is uncontrollable; only pinned down because they are holding her, and it is taking Wallace and Lennox both to manage this. I imagine her breaking free from this, drifting and twitching. I think about the Ishiguro, and I pray that she isn’t dying. There is no way we would continue. We would be ordered to turn here and head home, because there would be too much at risk. She would jeopardize this all.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask. I can’t see her face properly, because she’s moving so much, and her hair – which is short enough anyway, perpetually tied back, as the sensibilities of zero gravity dictate – her hair is mussed all over her face. I catch a glimpse of one of her eyes, and it looks all white, but I cannot tell if that is true or if it is me: the after-images still dance in my own vision. Then she turns her head on a convulsion, as Inna tries to prep a needle for her, and I see that her other eye is dark red. Just the eye, not running down her face: a thick blood-colour in the eyeball itself.
‘Please,’ Inna says, and Wallace and Lennox hold her extra tightly, really struggling for that second. Inna reaches in and presses the hypodermic to her neck and it only takes a second before Tobi goes limp. Lennox and Wallace let go and she starts to drift; her limbs all loose, her back arched. I think of my mother, and her angels: this is, for a second, as if Tobi is ascending. I stare, and Wallace and Lennox pat each other, checking they’re all right.
‘She’s fine,’ Inna says to me, as if she knew that I was about to ask. ‘It’s a subconjunctival haemorrhage. Bleeds can happen when the body is this stressed. Does she have a history of seizures?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘Tomas approved the medical checks, in the, uh, the personnel files.’ We split the tasks up: he took some approvals, I took others. We shared everything, but his memory of these things will be better than mine, I am sure.
He interrupts. ‘No history, doctor,’ he says. His voice comes over the intercom, filling the corridor. It’s jarring: how sometimes he is only in my ear, and sometimes all around us.
Wallace pulls Tobi towards him and folds her up slightly in his arms.
‘Where shall I take her?’ he asks Inna. He holds her like you would a child, maybe, carrying them to bed. He has daughters; I wonder if he carries them like this as well. She convulses slightly still, and her eyelids flicker. I imagine, under them, her one red eye darting left to right. I think that she could shake like this even if she was dead; when we were children, my mother kept chickens: I have seen them killed, their wings beating their sides long after their heads have been taken.
‘We should get her to her bed,’ Inna says. ‘We can secure her there. She’ll be fine when she wakes up.’ So Wallace carries Tobi past us all, and Lennox and Inna follow them. I pull myself along the rail behind. They are like swimmers. This is what it was likened to, in the early lessons. Push off, use your arms to steer and guide yourself, like rudders; use the environment to control your trajectory. That was the first lesson. I didn’t attend the others: there were better uses for my time. Hikaru cranes his neck and looks back from the cockpit section, and he asks how she is.
‘She’s okay,’ I say, and he nods. I feel as if I need to control this more. Otherwise, it could all be in danger of running away from me. We – they – strap her down, fastening her into the bed. Inna checks Tobi’s eye properly while she’s out, looking behind it, then scans her skull. We all stare at the results on the screens, and we’re relieved to hear that she’s clear. Inna tells us that it’s stress, pressure and stress that caused what happened, and nothing else. She opens the other beds up, and she floats above them.
‘This is as good a time as any,’ she says. ‘The rest of you should get some sleep as well. I’ll stay up with Hikaru, keep him company.’ She means: interview him. Take her time talking about who he is, how he feels about this mission. Check he’s okay, because now he might be the only pilot for a while.
‘I can stay awake as well,’ I say. ‘I’m not tired.’
‘Liar.’ She opens the lid of my bed and darkens the glass. ‘You need to sleep. You look like hell.’ That hurts, to hear her saying that. She leans in close to me, so that the others can’t hear. ‘If you truly didn’t sleep when we launched, you will need to now. Don’t argue with me, and go to bed.’ She takes my hand, or the end of my arm, and she drags me off the rail and towards the centre of the room. I let her.
‘Wake me if anything changes,’ I say.
‘We’re in the middle of nothingness, Mira. What’s going to change?’ I lie down and she links the magnets for me, then lowers the bed lid. She watches me until I can’t see her through the dark glass.
‘How long do I sleep for?’ I ask her, through the lid, but she doesn’t answer, and I can’t see out. I don’t like how little I can move in this thing. At home, I sleep on my side. It’s how I’m most comfortable: facing the wall, my back to the expanse of the room. Here, you are forced to lie on your back; and the hardness of the plastic now jars, it all seeming less comfortable than it could be; and the oxygen supply in these things runs slightly too cold. It regulates itself, because we didn’t want blankets or the opportunity to trap yourself in a sweatbox. It regulates itself: another way we have streamlined this whole process. Innovation through automation.
‘She’s forceful,’ Tomas says in my ear. I had forgotten that he was there.
‘I don’t need to sleep,’ I say.
‘Of course you do, Brother.’
‘You didn’t. You said you were going to bed, but then you were back again. You didn’t even leave.’
‘I did,’ he says. ‘I slept in the room here. Four hours, that’s all I need.’
‘Every night?’
‘Nowadays, sure. Sometimes it’s less. Sometimes more.’
‘Okay,’ I say. I think about talking to him more, but then it strikes me that he is already gone: that the slight hiss on the connection when he is listening to me is no longer there, and that in this bed I am all alone. So I talk to myself. We used to talk in bed, as children: every night before we went to sleep we would lie there, in the darkness, and we would go through what had happened. I don’t know when or why it began, but it was a habit. An addiction. It was something we always did. Our mother used to say that we jabbered ourselves to sleep. It wasn’t until we were sixteen and we moved into a new house in the city, away from the farm that we grew up on, that we were given separate rooms. I felt the space there, so I carried on talking into the darkness. It was only then that I realized it had always been that way. It wasn’t a conversation. We told each other what had happened, but we were actually talking to ourselves. Without him it was the same. I told myself what had happened, and I told myself what was going to happen on the next day. Look back, then peer forward. As an adult, speaking to myself, I pictured myself as a scientist, in a white coat, standing at the front delivering a lecture or a sermon. Increasingly, I could feel the pull of becoming somebody great. I wonder if he still does it now, with his baker lying next to him: if he mumbles to himself as I do, barely comprehensible but understandable by my own ears.
Here and now, I talk to myself. I tell myself what happened in the day that has just been, and before that, back to the last time I remember sleep as it is here: in a bed, and of my own volition.
4 (#ud7e19d1d-40b4-5ffa-87c0-fa4253665716)
I sleep, and there are dreams, but I do not remember them. I suppose that’s better, sometimes: to not have that looseness concerning their reality. When I wake up, I forget where I am for a second, because I could be anywhere but here. I push the lid of the bed and it opens upwards, and I see that they are all crowded around Tobi’s bed: I can see the back of her head, and I can see Inna peering into her eye, shining a light in there. I am selfish. I worry about my own being first, checking myself before asking about her. The white spots in my vision are gone, but my gut still creaks, and my body hurts. I do not know how long I slept for, because there is only a constant darkness outside to judge it from, and there are no clocks visible from here. I unclip myself and push up, turning to look at them. Wallace is here looking at Tobi with Inna, and he nods at me in that way that comfortable men do: dipping his head, no smile on his face. This is my good morning.
‘How is she?’ I ask.
‘I’m fine,’ Tobi says. ‘Freaked out, maybe.’ She nods at Inna, who lifts a screen to Tobi’s face. It mirrors Tobi’s eye back at her. I can see it from here as well: the sclera completely red, the cornea and pupil a muddy brown, floating in the midst of the bloody mess. I can see Tobi struggle to hold it together, her eyelid twitching, but she manages. ‘How did it happen?’ she asks. Her voice sounds dulled and slow, and somehow using a slightly lower register than usual. Perhaps she is still sedated, or the effects are wearing off: I can imagine Inna wanting to ease her into this, in case the shock causes a relapse of whatever her fit before was.
‘It’s nothing to be scared of. Sometimes, bleeds can happen in the eye. They’re as full of veins as the rest of you, and they’re tiny. It was most likely the pressure up here.’ She says that as if there’s a direction. So curious: we call space Up, and yet we’re just as likely to be below where we started at any given time. Up makes it easier to understand, I suppose. ‘It’ll pass. I’ve checked that it’s nothing insidious, and it’s not. It’s just a bloody vein. Like a cut, but it shouldn’t even hurt. Does it hurt?’
‘No,’ Tobi says.
‘And it won’t affect your vision. It’s just a bleed. You’ll be fine, honestly.’
‘Just a bleed,’ Tobi repeats. She pulls on her cheek, pulling it down so that she can see as much of her eye as possible. She looks from left to right, and she blinks, as if that might suddenly fix it. ‘I thought I was dying,’ she says. According to her file she’s survived two plane crashes. Maybe that was different. She rolls the eye around, looking to see if the red ends anywhere. ‘Is it a bad one?’
‘It’s nothing,’ Inna says. ‘I’m more worried about the fitting. You’ve had that before?’
‘When I was younger,’ Tobi says.
‘It wasn’t on your records,’ Inna says.
‘It nearly stopped me getting into the air force. But I was tested. I was cleared.’
‘Must be the pressure up here,’ Inna says. ‘Don’t worry about it. We can keep it under control.’ She smiles at Tobi: this isn’t her fault. ‘I’ll be back,’ she says, and she leaves Tobi magnetically clipped to the bed. Inna pulls herself over to me, smiling, but I can tell that she doesn’t mean the curves at the edge of her mouth.
‘You slept well?’ she asks.
‘Fine,’ I say.
‘Sunspots gone?’
‘Gone,’ I tell her. I blink a few times, to check, but my vision’s clear. Tobi has taken my cross. ‘She’s okay?’
‘Did you know that she was ill when she was a child?’
‘No, Tomas did the medical checks. Wait,’ I say. I call him, but Simpson answers. He asks what’s wrong, and I tell him nothing. I tell him I’ll call back later, as if he is just down the road, as if this is all meaningless. ‘Is she okay? Can she perform her duties?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ Inna says. ‘But I didn’t have it logged. I am meant to know if there’s something could go wrong.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘Don’t you know any of the medical conditions on this ship?’ she asks.
‘Tomas did it all,’ I say again. ‘I focused on the technical side. I am more like that, I think.’ She is quiet. She looks into my eyes, examining me, checking that I’m okay. ‘My gut is still churning,’ I say.
‘You’re probably hungry,’ she says. ‘You should eat something. We’ve eaten without you. We thought we should leave you to sleep. We asked Tomas, and he agreed.’ I was cut out of the loop, I think. I was, for a second, useless to them.
‘Did you sleep as well?’ I ask. I don’t want to be the only one who is struggling. I want them all to be crumbling, and I will be the glue.
‘For a few hours,’ she says, but I think that she’s lying. I detach myself and she reaches out her hand. She pulls me to the side, to the bar, as if I need her help. I cling on, and try to stretch out – back pushed forward, feet pointed, arms reaching for the side. I wonder if I look as ungraceful as I feel. ‘You’ll get used to this,’ she says, meaning everything, not just the lack of gravity.
‘I’m no good at it,’ I say.
‘You’re getting there,’ she lies again. I wonder if it’s something she does a lot: professional falsity. Or, maybe, it’s something she does with me, to make me feel better. A happy leader is a successful leader.
‘I am useless. I have never been one of those people with balance.’ This hurts more than I thought it would, because I am tensing all my muscles. I let go of the side-rail and drift out, and I crane my whole body around, trying to turn. If I can turn I can control this better, I think. I see Tobi, still there on her bed. Her eye is as if she’s been shot. Wallace is with her, consoling her. He is making her laugh, or he is laughing and she is watching him, but she is moving on. Rallying herself. I get distracted, and suddenly I’m not near the rail. Inna’s hand grabs me and pulls me back.
‘Easy to get adrift. No walks until you’re steady with this, okay?’
‘Like you could stop me,’ I say.
‘Try me.’ I feel more stirring; my gut, my groin. My entire body, reaching out for something more than I currently have. I look away, towards the cockpit, where Hikaru is either still on duty or back on duty, and Lennox is keeping him company. They are not talking, though: instead they are running the tests. It’s constant, testing. This is the difference between our mission and whatever it was they were doing on the Ishiguro.
‘I should see if they’re all right,’ I tell Inna.
‘Want a push over there?’ She is playful with it, but I am too uneasy, still. I have no desire to make a fool of myself any more than I already have.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ll crawl.’ She pulls her hands back and swats them together, as if washing them clean of me, and she pushes off, back towards Tobi. She puts her hand on Tobi’s back to console her, and Tobi looks at her with her one bloody eye, and she pulls a face: resilient and powerful. I cling on for what feels like minutes, and then wonder if I can’t move on.
This is a mission. It has always been clear to us, to Tomas and myself, that it is, and that it should be treated with the utmost seriousness. It may not be glorious, not yet, but there has never been an actual mission to space. Before this, everything was simply to see if we could do it. It was a desire, a proving of ourselves as a collective people. Breaking Earth’s atmosphere? We can reach it. The moon? We can land on it. It was showing off, puffing out our chests, planting flags. This time, there is a reason to be here. The Ishiguro was the most selfish, vainglorious expedition. Dr Singer’s research was only an afterthought, a bonus thing that he could do while they were up there. It didn’t matter, because what mattered was how shiny the crew were, how beautiful, how unstable.
We have a task, and it’s hugely important. I look at the results of the anomaly while we are up here, and I think that we do not know what this is: that it is so far beyond our comprehension that this discovery, this mission, it could change everything. It could be the thing that realizes our position in the universe. People search their entire lives for an answer, and maybe this is it: maybe this anomaly might give us a clue as to our beginnings. It will not be showy, and it will not be glorious, but it might be an answer.
A scientist wants nothing more.
We spend the day running tests. One of the things that we can do, as we get closer to the anomaly, is to discover its span: to see how wide it is, what expanse of space it actually covers. We have measured it from Earth, of course, plotting the space that it doesn’t fill, but from here we can be exact. Accuracy is easier up close. Wallace and Lennox and myself establish the equipment and run the software. The ship will do everything once the programs start running. We have scanners on here, deep-range systems that will be able to search further than anyone has ever searched. It’s a grab bag, a huge potluck of whether you get anything useful or not. When the software is running, Wallace shows myself and Lennox how it works, even though I already know. I helped design it. There is a room dedicated to my work: the lab, I called it in the early days of development. A room off the corridor, opposite the changing rooms and the airlock, and small, but enough space for the screens that I will need. Above all it is somewhere quiet for me to work. When the software is running, both Wallace and Lennox go to get some sleep. I stay here alone and attach myself to the bench in front of the console. I bring up the screens: 3D visualizations of the results from the pings being sent out, a map of the area of space we’re charting being drawn and constructed in real-time, and I’m able to zoom and pan and focus and highlight it as much as I like. I see the outline of the anomaly starting to be drawn: a patch of nothingness amongst the stars in the distance, surrounded by space. I spin the scene with my fingers, look at it from every angle, and I call Tomas.
‘This is incredible,’ I say to him.
‘I know,’ he says. He has an exact replica of my screens on Earth, showing him real-time – or as close to real-time as the lag will allow – what I am looking at.
‘Did you know about Tobi?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t important, I didn’t think. It was a long time ago. We certainly didn’t expect it again.’
‘I would have thought it enough to not let her up here.’ I can trace each ping from here, and watch them: little orange dotted lines, pushing out like digital ticker-tape. They disappear, and another part of the anomaly is confirmed: an area of space that we cannot see, that barely exists. ‘But you made the call.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘She was the best person for the job. I don’t mind there being something wrong with you if you’re the best person for that particular job. I honestly never thought that it would be a problem, Mira.’ He is silent. I imagine him leaning over his computer, bent towards the screen, examining the visualization of this. Watching the pings that I watched fifteen seconds before, as the data reaches him. ‘You’ll have to deal with it.’
‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Is there anything else I need to know about any of the others?’
‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Would it matter if there was?’
‘What if she had died?’ I ask. An orange line flies past the anomaly and carries on into the distance: traced away, so small that I will never see it. The result of what it finds will return to us when it does: eventually it will stop. Maybe it will stop so far away that we will no longer even be receiving data when it sends itself back. That we, humanity, will no longer even be alive.
‘Well, she didn’t,’ Tomas says. ‘She is fine. Bruised and embarrassed, but she’s fine.’
‘Okay,’ I say. I spin the anomaly again. We have no way of knowing how deep it is, because we have to imagine that it is a wall, and there is no way of seeing what’s behind it. ‘Does it scare you?’ I ask. ‘This anomaly? Whatever it is.’ I wait for a reply, but one doesn’t come. ‘Are you there?’ I ask, but nobody answers, not even Simpson; which means that Tomas is still sitting at his desk, still at the computer, but he’s simply choosing to stay quiet.
I stay and watch the lines. This is such a process: like tracing the outline of a planet with the ends of strings of thread. Tomas and I wrote an algorithm to plot the pinging of this thing. The intention was, it would find likely areas and match them, following lines and trying to extrapolate the size of it that much faster. There is a game you play when you are children, Battleship: you pick a place that your opponent might have placed their ship, a number on a grid that you cannot see, and you hope that you will somehow pick the right space. If you do, you extrapolate the rest of the ship based on that: moving up or down or left or right, assuming the likely choice that they have made, hoping for another hit and to sink their ship. We played it a lot, Tomas and I. It was the perfect way for us to test how much we thought alike: how much we had to work to outfox the other. I imagine him, watching these with me, or slightly delayed; or maybe not. Maybe gone from the lab, finally heading home to his baker, to spend time with her. Forgetting about me, about this, about us, for an evening. Thinking of this as work, not what it actually is.
I switch the screens off. I don’t need to watch this. If he is still with me, so be it. I detach myself and push off, and I struggle at the ceiling, but then I push myself through to the corridor, and then down to the living quarters. The ship is quiet. Four of the bed lids are down and darkened, and only Tobi is still awake. I drag myself through, trying to make as little noise as possible, and she turns her head to watch me gracelessly approach. I settle in the seat next to her and clip myself in. She yawns and nods at me. I feel secure for a second. It’s nice, after the chaos of floating, to have this security. She is confident, and taking back control.
‘How long do you reckon we’ve been up here now?’ she asks. She puts her hand over the clock on the screen and looks at me. ‘No cheating, take a guess,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘See if you can guess. I couldn’t. I can’t tell if it’s only been a day, or if it’s longer. Everything becomes loose here, you know? Without the sunrise, without the sunset. Without defined bedtimes. And I feel tired all the time, whatever I’m doing. And that’s not my eye or whatever. Even just sitting here, that feels tiring.’ She turns back and looks at the screen, focusing on the expanse of nothing that’s in front of us. The view that offers precious little sensation that we’re even moving, so large is space and so small are we. She reveals the clock.
‘We should try to think of it in terms of hours here, hour to hour, rather than concentrating on the days. Back home, that’s where they need days,’ I say to her.
‘Yeah, maybe. Maybe.’ She yawns again. ‘But everything is looser. Time, speed, place. Everything. If you focus on a star you can see it move, if you stare at it. Or, you know, you can see us moving.’ I do as she says. I pick one – Algol, in Perseus – and I stare at it. I plot where it is in relation to the rest, and to the console and the frame of the window, and then I keep staring. Over time, and I have no idea how long that time is, it shifts, or we do. Such an infinitesimally small amount, barely perceptible. Barely registering. ‘It’s humbling, I think,’ Tobi says. ‘But at least we’re definitely moving.’
‘You walked away from two crashes,’ I say.
‘I did.’
‘Were you scared? How did you do it?’
‘What do you mean?’ she asks.
‘You were scared, with your eye,’ I say. She reaches up and touches it. ‘But back then.’
‘Well, now. See, I couldn’t do anything about the eye. If something had gone inside me, that’s not a thing I alter myself. If I was dying, not like I could change that. If I was dying then, that was it. Boom, dead.’ She rubs it, as if she can feel the wound. ‘With the crashes, that was in my own hands. All I could do was try to save myself.’
I stay sitting next to her. Neither of us talks after that.
Wallace, when he wakes up, asks me to go to the engines with him. He is proud of them. They are one of the few parts of the Lära that we avoided directly working on, once we had told him our brief. We helped him assemble his team and they designed them. There were stipulations – cost, consumption, having to work alongside the piezoelectric life-support systems – but they had carte blanche after that. He shows me them, because he wants my approval. He wants me to see how impressive they are, and how well they have worked. He waits by them, and he runs diagnostics. Now, they’re doing nothing: our plan is that we will not stop until we reach the anomaly, and we’re coasting off the momentum that we established with the initial acceleration. The boosters stop us accelerating any more – or, at least, stop us moving out of our allotted safety zone of acceleration – so, for the most part, the engines spin quietly. They are ready to stop us, when needed, but now he can run checks and tests, and, as he tells me, try to optimize them out here, to do real-world work on them that was impossible back on Earth.
‘It’s good,’ I tell him. ‘You do what you want to, okay? I trust you on this.’
‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘Appreciate it.’ But he doesn’t look away, and he doesn’t ready himself with work. ‘Look, I have a favour to ask,’ he says. ‘I’m missing my girls.’
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘Would it be all right if I called them?’ He has a wife and two daughters. They live in a house in Orlando. His wife is a teacher and his daughters are both at the school she now works at. I try to remember any other facts from his file. ‘It’s Karly’s birthday tomorrow. On the eighteenth. I just wanted to give her a call, say hello to them all.’
‘I, uh. Listen,’ I say. We have rules. They are allowed to pass on messages or have messages passed by Tomas or the ground crew, because that’s the only approval for bandwidth we have. He knows that. I don’t want to have to say it.
‘No, sure, it’s okay.’ He is saving me from having to. He is lost, for a second, not making eye contact with me. ‘I know, you let me, you’ll have to let them.’
‘You know how it is,’ I say. I cannot stand this. I cannot abide this conversation: not just the favour he’s asked, but the very being part of it. I want out. ‘I have to get back and check on the others,’ I say, and he nods, so I go. I move down the corridor and I leave him there by himself.
‘Problem?’ Tomas asks. He has been listening in. I want to tell him to stop, but we designed the system so that he could; so that, were it me down there, I could, if I wanted to. Complete mission parity. Completely open.
‘No,’ I say. ‘He’s lonely.’
‘Aren’t we all,’ Tomas says. I picture him with his baker. I do not say what I am thinking.
I want to sleep, but I cannot. I lie there and I think about what this means, and the pressure. There is always something coming, here. I have to be at my best, and that is my worry: if I do not sleep, I will function at some percentage of my absolute ability, and I could ruin everything. I get out of bed, and nobody is looking, and I contemplate staying awake; but there is another option. In the medical cupboard, the hypos with the sedative. We have so many shots, delivered in tiny liquid capsules which are then injected into the neck before dissolving; and they are harmless, non-addictive. Before, Inna administered them, but, I reason, how hard can it be? I am not scared of needles. Needles are a necessary evil. I load one into the hypo and try to find the spot she pushed it into my neck before, where there is still a pock-mark on the skin; and I hold the injector there and push the button. When I have done the first I make a choice: to take another, straight away. Two to settle me, to ensure that I am down. I inject it into the same spot; this one stings a little more. I get back to my bed and I begin to count, and I am gone. This works. This has really worked, and I can sleep, and be safe.
‘Wake up, Brother,’ Tomas says. ‘We’ve found something you’re going to want to see.’ He opens the bed for me, and I’m alone in the sleeping area. ‘Come to the lab,’ he says, which means it’s something related to the anomaly. He was meant to wake me first, before anything was announced, before any decisions were made. We were both meant to be there at the start of these things.
I have an erection, so I dress myself, pulling on the thick trousers designed to regulate our temperatures, and I desperately need to piss but that can wait, because I’ve obviously already missed something that he thinks is important. Down the corridor, all their voices coo as I float down, clinging to the bars. I think of myself as a trainee ballerina. Pointe. Demi something. Stupid. I should have been here.
I wonder if Tomas has done this on purpose.
One of the screens has been extended to fill the length of the wall, and they’re all peering at it. It looks like nothing at first; as if it’s been switched off. But then Inna turns to me, and smiles. She holds her hand out to usher me to the front.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she asks. I peer at it, and then I see it.
It’s the anomaly. I can’t tell the scale, so I shift the screen to a more scientific view – and they groan as the grid pulls itself over the image, a scientific sheen over this thing of natural beauty, but then I can see how far away it is, and still how large, even at this immense distance – and then I see the edges of it. It’s like a sheet of something that sits in the middle of the nothing: a pulled, taut sheet, where the corners and edges ripple like waves. And the texture – admittedly we’re far out, and this resolution, as much as we can see, isn’t going to be entirely trustworthy – but it’s like oil, somehow. It’s black, but not like the colour of space. Space isn’t true black. When you look at it, sure, that’s what it seems. But when you examine it, it’s got colour and light bouncing around inside it. It’s lit, and the blackness you can see is just a temporary absence of light. This is a different sort of black, painted or created, but I’ve never seen anything darker. I’ve never seen anything this pure before.
‘This is from the bounce?’ I ask. We have a chain of satellites between us and the anomaly. Tomas and I spent a year setting them up, sending them out and getting them roughly where we wanted them to be. They bounce visual data, downscaling it at each choke-point. The bounce is how I can talk to Tomas from here; and now we are finally close enough to see this in a resolution that lets us make out details.
‘It is,’ Tomas says. ‘We are finally close enough.’ Any chance of this being as incredible as I know it is – because it’s never been seen on a live feed, not like this; and that fact alone essentially means it’s never been truly seen full stop, as that’s how humans work – is diminished by seeing this last. It is, to me, like being told the ending at the start of the story.
‘We couldn’t sit on our hands while you slept,’ Tomas replies. I wonder how this reads to the rest of the crew. How antagonistic they think he is, or I am.
‘No,’ I say, but I can taste the lie in my own mouth, and feel myself brimming with anger. ‘Of course not. You were right to continue.’
‘We woke you up as soon as we were close enough to see this thing, and when we had processed the picture properly. We had to be sure.’ Of course you were sure. Of course you waited. I call up the readings from the ping, try to compare it to the pictures we have received from the satellites. The ping is working, giving us something resembling an edge, numbers, an outline. I examine the readings concerning the scale of it, the approximations of how large it is. I check the numbers against what’s in my head, and then call up the old measurements – Dr Singer’s best guesses, the estimates that he worked on his entire life. They are wrong, and I can tell that. It’s obvious to anybody even glancing at a comparison. While it’s possible that Dr Singer was wrong, it’s unlikely. ‘The scale of this thing,’ I say. ‘Were we off?’
‘It’s definitely larger,’ Tomas says. ‘It’s grown.’
‘Or it’s closer.’
‘Either way it’s closer, surely? Whether it has physically grown or hasn’t.’ He is explaining the basics of physics to me. I am grateful that he cannot see me.
‘How far away are we?’ I ask. I can hear the shake in my own voice.
‘Ten days,’ Tobi says. ‘Somewhere between ten and eleven. We’ll have an exact number of hours soon.’
‘That close?’
‘That close.’
I peer into it as much as I can. I know that Tomas will be doing the same: standing close enough to smell the holo-screen he has fitted down there, the vague waft of the chemical processes that give it capacitive abilities. He will be trying to find something else before I can. And to think: he said that he wasn’t jealous of my being up here, and him being down there.
The crew filter off, back to their jobs. Apart from Inna: she stays in the doorway. She leans back and becomes a sudden distraction: I notice her there. She leans back as far as she can. Almost like a stretch.
‘It’s incredible,’ she says.
‘It will be,’ I say. I wonder if Tomas is still listening. ‘Soon, we might know exactly what it is that we’re looking at. Then it will be truly incredible.’
‘That doesn’t change the fact of seeing it, does it?’
‘What?’ I try and soften the question, which I know comes out far too hard. ‘It has to change it, surely?’
‘Why?’
‘Because we don’t understand it. That’s human nature, isn’t it? To understand.’
‘Human nature’, she says, ‘is to be there and watch as everything unravels.’ She says it so lightly and gently, as if she’s leading me to a concept that I might not otherwise understand. ‘That’s what you’re really doing, isn’t it?’ she asks, and then she pushes away from the wall and pirouettes. I don’t understand what she’s saying. I don’t.
‘Wait,’ I say, but she has gone down the corridor, disappeared into the living quarters. I turn back to the screen and watch the anomaly: as the edge curls and the light runs down it. I try to find the beauty in it; I try to appreciate it for what it is. To see it as nothing more, not anything that runs deeper. It is something we do not understand, and that has to be appealing. We are here, and so is the anomaly, and it is as real as anything else I have ever seen. That has to be enough, I tell myself.
‘Careful,’ I hear Tomas say. I decide to not ask what he is talking about, and instead I pull the picture apart with my hands, zooming in as much as I can, until it’s a blurry black grain. There are specks in it: miniatures here and there. Nothing, probably: asteroids, detritus, scree. I make a note to myself to track them, to aid us plotting our course or in case they do anything interesting. I don’t say anything to Tomas about them, because then he’ll watch them as well, and that can be one more thing that he can keep from me, that he can let me sleep through. Instead they can be mine: something that I have discovered by myself.
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James Smythe
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The stunning sequel to James Smythe’s critically acclaimed literary sci-fi novel The Explorer.TWENTY YEARS following the spacecraft Ishiguro’s disappearance, humanity is setting its sights on the heavens once more.Under the direction of two of the most brilliant minds science has ever seen – twin brothers Tomas and Mirakel Hyvönen – this space programme has been tasked with one of the most difficult missions in its history: to study what is being called ‘the anomaly’ – a vast blackness of space thought to be responsible for the loss of the Ishiguro.But as the anomaly tests Mira and the rest of the hand-picked crew’s sanity, Tomas will have to use all his ingenuity if he is to save his brother and their mission.