The Echo (27 page)

She keeps breathing. I can hear it. I can see her chest. I am afraid to leave her, but I need more than this. Inna passes out, but she is still alive. The sealant appears to have worked, and she is still breathing, but I cannot feel a pulse. When she is settled, still weakly breathing, I think that I should check in the other room: to see that Hikaru is dead, and what has happened to Easton. As soon as I leave her and get into the corridor I shake until I have to stay perfectly still, and I feel – I see – myself vomit. It’s a reaction that I can’t control.

I see Easton inside the airlock. He’s having trouble breathing: his chest is bloody. Ribs puncturing lungs, I’d imagine. He is suffocating, dying, pawing at the floor. He looks at me, and his eyes are so big in his drawn face that they’re almost comical.

I’m dying, he seems to be saying, though his maw of a mouth. He mouths it: open and close, open and close.

I’m dying, he says.

‘Good,’ I reply.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.

– T. S. Eliot

Inna lasted nearly a day. I never found her pulse again, but she kept breathing for a while. It was too shallow. She didn’t wake up. She had no last words, not to me at least. Only what she said to Easton, and I couldn’t even remember that as I held her body.

I didn’t think about the cycles. About how often I would have to watch that scene play out.

The loop begins with Hikaru in there as Easton sleeps, attempting to do as I ended up doing: seal the airlock doors and trap him. Maybe he intended to flush him out; I cannot tell. Hikaru moves slowly and quietly. He begins to tap on the keys to close the door, but he’s not the stealthy one here. Easton has been awake the entire time. He launches himself around the corner of the airlock, faster than Hikaru can react – and since then, with the time that I have had to myself, I have contemplated his deterioration and the effect that it has had on his body, and how adept he became in that time at adapting to the weightlessness, turning it to his own advantage – and then he stabs him. I have been able to examine the blade over time: presumably torn from some part of the
Ishiguro
. What I thought was a single piece is not. It is the construct of hundreds of thin wires, torn and stripped from the interior systems of the ship, I would assume, wound around and around, then carved and smoothed, heated and melted together to form a new single blade. It is the product of some work, of time and effort. It is quite elegant, I suppose.

He slides the blade into Hikaru’s neck and then scutters backwards through the air, and there’s a look in his eyes: almost as if he’s shocked at himself. Self-preservation, that’s all it was. He knew what Hikaru was planning. I don’t know what happened on the
Ishiguro
, and I don’t suppose that I ever will, but something made him this way. He is broken and gone, a product of time and circumstance. I feel sorry for him, sometimes. When I try to think of him as a man other than this: away from this situation, from the deaths that he caused; or causes; or will cause. When Inna arrives he seems to panic further. She is another potential threat. She is only trying to help Hikaru but she’s so aggressive in how she speaks to him. He lashes out. He’s trying to keep her back. He’s just unlucky with Inna, I think. There is no malice in his murdering her. I wonder how this has worked for him: if he’s been looping but somehow ageing at the same time. How long has he been alive for? How long has he been out here? And when he dies, if he wakes up and doesn’t understand what has happened, how can he excuse what he has become?

I can see myself in him, or him in me. Especially now that I’m all alone. The last one left, really; the only one actually alive. I am, however, as much a part of this as they. It begins when I am not in the room: when I am back at my starting place, looking away from the bodies, head bowed; an actor designated a part, a starting position behind a curtain.

For a few cycles I took Inna from the room and saved her briefly, convinced that I could do something differently. I had everything prepared, so that when I looked away and the play began, I could get her and save her. I have tried every option that I can think of. After a while, when I got tired, I began leaving her there. I would watch it happen on video, because I didn’t want to be there in person. Would she think that I was betraying her? Of course she would. It would be the third time. The cock would crow, and she would never be mine again. So I leave her there. When she’s not aided by me, she dies a lot faster. She bleeds out in minutes, and she tries to save herself, flapping uselessly, coating the room in her blood. It’s hard to tell who dies first: her or Easton.

Sometimes I find myself staying with them because I can’t stand the thought of it starting again: so I stand in the doorway and watch their bodies after they’ve passed away, and I try to stay there for as long as possible. It’s a battle of wills. How long can I stare at them; how long can I wait while they die.

It’s been three weeks since they died, and I don’t know how many times I have watched it, but I am not used to it, and I don’t hate their deaths any less than I used to.

The ship has been quiet. There are no echoes in space. I should know. I talk to myself, because why would I not? I do it simply so that I can hear another voice in the void. Despite his betrayal – and I see it as that, surely and definitively – I miss Tomas fiercely. I try to talk to him, and I send him more messages, telling him what has happened, explaining how alone I now am, and yet I only hear my own voice coming back. Still: at least this voice is something we share.

Now, I have no trouble sleeping. I shut the door on the bed and in there it is silent, and it is still. When I wake up, I wonder if anything will be different, but I know the answer. Even though there was no audience, the play continued. Every day I use more of my air and get closer to having to move the ship or die. And if I die – if I choke to death, unable to breathe – all that will be guaranteed is that I will have to live that death over again.

I wonder where I would begin from.

I have done things to try and help me understand this. I have seen if I can play with the scenario. I cannot stop it: the cycle never begins until I am away from it, and I cannot reach it in time. Chaos theory was wrong: it plays itself out, always exactly the same. We are doomed to repetition. There are never variations. I have tried to tamper with the room before a cycle begins, to see if I can affect it. If I suck all the air out, for example, can I knock them all out before it begins? Drag the key players to other areas? Lock Cormac in before he can do his damage? Open the airlock as soon as the cycle begins, maybe? Nothing sticks. All my work is undone. I cannot explain any of this, and thus I have become neutered: a scientist who understands nothing of his surrounding or situation, who can prove or disprove nothing, who can never attain answers.

One time, I dragged Inna’s body from there as I did that first occasion, only faster – I am becoming more adept at the path to the table, knowing when to turn my body and hit the walls at their best, even if the collisions leave me with bruises, all to get Inna back within the shortest time possible. I cannot save her, so I try to make it easier on her. I make her comfortable. I find myself wondering what’s wrong with her; pushing aside her top, and then seeing where the scar lines the tattoo, how much of her side is the fake flesh that they used to seal her up. She never had a chance to let me see it in the light. Here, looking at it with as close to scientific eyes as I can muster, I can see that there is art in both. I wonder which came first: the desire for the bird tattoo or the scar? If she saw the line of the scar when she was healed, saw the different tone of the synthetic skin, and through some almost-pareidolic reaction she saw the bird on her chest, deciding there and then to make it somehow more real? I look up the word that the bird carries on the computer, and of course it is Cancer. She was shedding the past, looking to a future. Would that I could.

We – that is, the ship and her crew, in whatever form we might take – have drifted. I don’t know exactly where we are, or how much the anomaly might have grown – or moved – from our original position. On the maps, we are a way from it, but there’s no real way of tracking what the anomaly is doing. I repeatedly sit at the console in the cockpit and think about pressing buttons and seeing if I can fly this thing: program a new destination. I have never tried to fly this. But I would assume that it couldn’t be that difficult: we designed how it should work, and we watched them build it, watched the trials. We had simulations constructed in the early days to give us an idea of how the yoke would work, the joystick, and how the remote controls would work given the lag and so forth. I took the controls then, once. The heft and power of the real thing can’t be that much different.

Sometimes I think that there might be an exit on the other side of this thing. That I could travel through it and maybe there I would find a way out.

I go through cycles myself: where I have to leave them alone to play out as they will; or where I cannot take watching Inna die again, so I attempt to save her, despite knowing the outcome. I think of it as a duty: every few times, I want those final few moments with her. I wait until it’s started, with my back to them and my eyes closed, and then when I hear the action start I put myself in position. As I try to save Inna she seems to know what I am doing. She appreciates it. I am there with her in her final moments, and I try to give her peace.

I think about the great discoveries in our lifetime, in the lifetimes of those who came before us, and I wonder what they must have first thought: how inexplicable it was to contemplate a round Earth, to see and understand comets and meteors, to uncover evolution, electricity, the atom bomb. As we took those first tentative steps into space, inventing a means to explore that which had previously been something close to hearsay. I used to wonder how it must have felt, as somebody who had seen two wars at the start of that century, to watch that launch on the television at the time: to see where we had reached. To have watched
Le Voyage dans la lune
as a child, and then to see it realized. No face in the moon; no mermaids or aliens. Instead, only footsteps and flags and dust. Just as incredible, when you think of it. And now, if I return, they will know of this: that I discovered something truly inexplicable. Here is a space that makes no sense; space in the truest sense of the word. Not the void that we describe with that word in our regular lives, but something else. When the
Ishiguro
didn’t come home, hypothesis was everything. Now, I could tell them so much more.

Tomas still can. Even without me he has enough. I wonder if he’s told the world that I am lost yet? I wonder if he’s told them that I am dead? I tell Inna, on those times that I save her, that we will make it home. I know that, for her, it is a lie. But in those moments either she believes it, or it makes her feel better, and then she dies with more of a smile on her face. She still trusts me, even after everything.

I have lost track of how long this has taken; how long I have been here, doing this for.

It is one of the times in which I save her. I pick her body up and let the blood soak me again, into my suit which has been soaked so many times. The blood stays on me: I am out of this cycle, and my suit is darkened with Inna’s life. Each time it happens there is something so warm about it. It’s almost comforting, to feel her so alive for just a few seconds. This is Inna, and I am doing right by her. If I can get better at saving her, with practice and hard work, she might one day have more time with me. I am not trying to save her life now. I know that she is beyond that. I would need to be a surgeon to attempt more than I currently do, and while I have contemplated it, a part of me is unwilling to punish her in her dying moments with experimentations and attempts. I have done it before, when she was outside, but there was a distance there. I think, now, about the direct pain she would feel; and how I would feel her dying breath on my face as I tried. It would hurt her. But to preserve her, to ease her suffering, that is something I can do. I am injecting her with the sedatives when she leans to me and speaks to me, the first time that she has done this in any of her cycles.

‘Let me die,’ she says. Her voice is barely a whisper. Barely human, really, from the sound. I stop what I am doing and drop the hypo, and I listen in case she says anything more. But she doesn’t. That’s it. Her eyes shut and her mouth stays open. Her words smell of her blood as it gargles it in her throat.

Let me die, she said.

‘I have been,’ I tell her body when she is gone, and I’m waiting for the next cycle to begin. ‘Was that not enough?’ In her next cycle, I just watch. As she dies, as they all die, as Cormac gasps at me, choking in his cell, I tell Inna that I am doing as she asked. ‘This is what you wanted,’ I say. She doesn’t look at me. She floats on her back, with her head tilted back, and the blood floats like children’s bubbles.

‘I have to sleep,’ I tell Inna as she dies another time, and I watch her. She chokes and coughs, lying there on the table. I say goodnight to her. She dies as I sleep. I talk to her as I shut my eyes, and tell her what I have done. Not that she will remember any of it. I sleep with the lid of the bed open, because I don’t need the darkness, not really.

When I wake up it is to the alarm of Inna’s screaming as she dies again. It will have happened all night: there must have come a point where my body was more susceptible to the noise. I drag myself from my bed and to their room, and I look at them. She always ends up the same way: face down, near the ceiling, a red balloon floated off and trapped in the branches of a tree. They have reached the end of a cycle as I enter the room, and I know I need to wash. I take a shower, watching their bodies the whole time. I am unwilling to close my eyes in case the cycle starts again. It’s never happened with me in the room before, but there’s always a first time. So I wash with my eyes open, the shampoo swirling around me in the shower-pod and stinging my eyes, but still. I dry myself and then shit, not taking my eyes off them the entire time. When I am done I stay watching them, naked in that room. They are all dead. Cormac stares at me, as if, as he died, he wondered how I could be so casual about the whole thing. As if I am the murderer here. I eat a bar, never taking my eyes off them. Even when I look at myself in the mirror – at my beard, so Robinson Crusoe am I – I am keeping an eye on them. I have to be prepared.