The Echo. James Smythe

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