The Echo. James Smythe

‘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