The Echo. James Smythe

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.