Vessel (22 page)

They turned off the corridor into room twenty-four. It was a modest but tidy
space, with a small bed in the middle and a big glass window overlooking the desert.

'Great view, huh?' Todd
said, looking out with his hands on his hips.

'Sure,' Sean said, giving it a cursory glance before
scanning the room. There was a desk opposite the bed, so he opened the drawers and looked through them.

'Let me see then, the story,
' Todd said, scratching his neck. 'There was a scientist — a whole bunch of them in fact — and they found a box in the desert. Or was it a box the size of a house? I can't remember. Anyways, they find this box and they take it back to a top secret laboratory.'

Sean rifled though the sheets of blank paper and
stationary littering the drawers, but besides that, there was nothing. He closed them, and moved on to her bedside cabinet.

'Say
— are you looing for anything in particular?' Todd asked.

'No,' Sean said, looking through a drawer of socks. 'What happened after they found the box?'

'Ah yes, the box. They took the box back, but they couldn't do anything with it. It was solid — no way in, no way out. Come to think of it, that box must've been the size of a house or they wouldn't have tried to get in it. A house is pretty big though, don't you think —'

'It doesn't matter. W
hat happened next?'

'Er
— no, I suppose it doesn’t matter,' Todd said, sounding a little flustered. 'Well, after a while, the scientists began seeing things, having visions. Like, real powerful stuff. Then one day the box takes one of them, and he was gone, just like that. But he returns, and he's not the same as before he disappeared — he's
changed
. It's like he's become one with the box. But the box makes the other scientists lose their minds, and so it's decided that the box should be destroyed. They do, and the scientist that came back from the box dies with it. And that's it.' He shrugged. 'I'm not too good at telling stories. Not like Ruthy was.'

Sean had stopped looking through the drawers and was
fixed on Todd. 'So it's true …' he whispered.

* * *

'What do you think it wants?' Sally asked, gazing out the window of the MLM at the colourless cuboid.

'I don't know,' Mikhail said, watching
it with her.

'It's beautiful in an odd ki
nd of way,' Sally said, watching a star flicker as it passed behind it. 'I think it wants to communicate with us, but it just doesn't know how.'

Mikhail leaned closer
to the window such that his nose touched the glass. 'Do you think it wants to communicate through me?'

Sally looked at him, at his squashed nose, and laughed.
'I don't know,' she said, still chuckling a little. 'Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Maybe we'll never know.'

Mikhail
pulled back from the window and turned to her, the tip of his nose bright red. Sally burst out laughing again and pushed him away.

'What?' he said smiling. 'What is it?'

'You're so silly.'

Instead of doing her usual experiments, Sally spent the rest of the afternoon explaining to Mikhail about the stars.
It was a strange experience; the more she talked to him, the more he seemed to be growing up, as if the youthful brain trapped in his adult body was maturing at an accelerated pace.

'There are three hundred billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way,' Sally explained, 'and about five hundred billion galaxies in
the universe.'

'And how many universes are there?' Mikhail asked, hanging on
to her every word.

It was a good question, she had to give him credit for that
. 'No one knows. Most people think there's only one.'

Mikhail wrinkled his
brow. 'That's not right,' he said.

Sally blinked.
'How many do you think there are?'

He
leaned back, touching his head against the canvas wall. 'It's not really a thing for numbers. Other universes exist in a state that numbers can't describe.'

At first Sally thought what he was saying was nonsense, but the look in his eye changed her mind.
'Have you been there?' she asked. 'To the other universes, I mean.'

Mi
khail's face went blank for a second.

'I can't remember.'

Then his grin returned. 'Do you have any more apple pie?'

Sally
shook her head in humorous disbelief. They went for some more apple pie.

'Back on Earth,' Sally said, putting her
finished pouch in the waste, 'we have pies in many different flavours. You’d love it.'

'Like what?' He was still licking
the nozzle of his pouch, having squeezed every last morsel of the pie from it.

'Anything you can think of. Rhubarb and raspberry, blueberry, peach, pumpk
in — the list is endless.'

'Wow.
I
would
love to try all those.'

'Maybe one day you will
.'

Sally looked through the tiny porthole
on the bottom of the service module, where a glimpse of Earth shone through.

'When are they coming for us?' Mikhail said
, somehow echoing Sally's own thoughts.

'I don't know,' she
said, sighing. 'I don't know.'

The
atmosphere became sombre. Sally and Mikhail did their chores together as usual, but they did them with a whole lot less laughing and joking. It was as though Mikhail was feeding off Sally's sadness, her longing for home, reflecting her emotion back at her. She'd been okay the whole while she was alone, able to ignore her real feelings, but now she had someone whose company she enjoyed, the beckoning call of planet Earth seemed to tug harder at her heartstrings.

'You miss Earth, don't you?
' Mikhail said as Sally ran through the readings for the water reclamation tanks.

'Yes, I do.'

'What do you miss most about it?'

Sally stopped to think. There was so much she missed
: silly little things, mostly. Seeing the leaves turn a beautiful burnt orange as winter rolled in. The smell of barbecued ribs coming from the neighbour's garden. Laughing at TV re-runs of Frasier that she'd seen a thousand times before. 'I guess I miss everything.'

Mikhail gave her a reassuring smile,
and said nothing.

They didn’t talk again
properly until the next day, while Sally was running through some gamma ray readings from a nearby star, Wolf 359.

'Did you know it'
s possible to create faster-than-light communication?' Mikhail said, out of the blue. 'I know that's something you're interested in, isn't it?'

Sally stopped what she was doing.
Had she heard him right? 'Really? How?'

'Not how,' Mikhail said, 'where.'

'Okay — where?'

'You'
re limited by the speed of light within this universe, you know that much. But punch through to the next and you can move in infinite directions and speeds all at once.'

Sally shook her head, confused.
'I don't — I don't know what you mean.'

Mikhail took her hands
and cupped them into a ball. 'You understand your universe to be like this,' he said, 'and so it takes time to travel from one side to the other.' He indicated his meaning by tracing a line around the ball of Sally's hands. He then spread her hands open so she held them flat together, as though she were praying. 'This is how your universe really is, and it moves between the other universes like this.' He placed his hands over the top of hers and slid them across. They were warm, soft. 'You can leave this universe, enter another and return at any point in an instant.' He released her hands and grinned. 'Just like that.'

All at once, Sally felt something inside her, something she didn't understand. It was a w
arm uncertainty, a feeling that, even though her future was indistinct, everything would be okay. She savoured the moment, and the lingering warmth on the backs of her hands. 'How do you know all this?' she asked.

Mikhail shrugged.
'I just do. I have these thoughts and ideas that appear in my head. One minute they aren't there; the next they are.'

Sally wondered who Mikhail
really was. Was he still Mikhail? Was he still human? Or was he something else? She realised she didn't care. She liked him just the way he was, whatever he was. They talked long into the night, sharing stories between them. Well, Sally told the stories while Mikhail smiled and laughed in the right places, frowned and shook his head with disbelief in the others. She poured herself out to him like she'd never done to anyone before, told him things that had been bottled up inside her for as long as she could remember. When she told him about the death of her mother, he leaned in towards her and held her for a few fleeting moments. She felt a tight knot in her shoulders that had gone unnoticed for weeks — maybe even years — unwind as if it were nothing.

'You've been through a lot to get to where you
are now,' Mikhail said, holding his untouched carton of apple juice.

Sally smiled. S
he never saw herself as a martyr or a hero, or even a cause for sympathy, but it was nice to have her hardships recognised. She had fought with such defiance for so long to push through the barriers of gender and intelligence that contested her every move on Earth. It was a constant battle that never had any time for the weakness of emotion, so she had hardened herself without realising it, built up an armoured shell that was held in place by the twisted bindings of insecurity and stubbornness. But with Mikhail, that armour fell away, and she wasn't afraid to leave her weaknesses exposed to him.

'Do you remember anything else about where you came from?' she asked
him, to which he shuffled, looking uncomfortable.

'I
— I think I do. I can't be sure. When I think too hard about it, I get these headaches' — he rubbed his temples — 'but they're not that bad. It's a strain to think, but the more I do, the more I remember, and with it comes knowledge I never even knew I had.'

'Can you tell me what it's like?'

Mikhail looked confused. 'What do you mean?'

'I mean, can you tell me what it's like to be
— well, to be the first human to communicate with extra-terrestrial life?'

Mikhail grinned
. 'I'm not the first. And I won't be the last. They've spoken to you, but at the moment you just can't hear it. Give it time, and the words will come. Listen, and you will hear.'

Sally hoped
beyond hope that he would continue talking. She was enthralled.

'It's like opening your eyes for the first time,' Mikhail said, 'when up to
then you have merely been dreaming.'

'Will my eyes ever be open?'

Mikhail stroked her hair, running his fingers down her face and under her chin. 'Yes, they will. When you're ready.'

* * *

In downtown Moscow, Detective Inspector Yefim Banin flicked through a file that had been dropped on his desk that morning. It annoyed him, partly because he was already rushed off his feet, and partly because he hadn't done traffic incidents in nearly twenty years.

Reopened case,
the post-it note stuck to the front said
. Chief wants you on it. Get it done quick.

He took a sip of his watery tea and grimaced.
As he read through the file, he built up the scene in his mind: Lev Ryumin, former RFSA Flight Director, got drunk and ran his car off the road and into a ditch, hitting a telegraph pole that collapsed the roof, killing him instantly. Bad luck.

But the forensics department had found traces
of someone else's skin on Ryumin's body, and now the case file was on Banin's desk. Why were forensics even looking at the body at this late hour? The case had been shut ages ago. What a waste of time.

He picked up the phone and dialled the Chief's extension. It rang,
and was answered by a young woman: the Chief's secretary.

'Chief Inspector Azurov's office, how can I help?'

'It's Banin.'

'Oh, hello
— how are you?'

'I'm ok
ay. Actually I'm not okay. I've been assigned to some goddamn re-opened forensic bullshit case, and I'm already up to my eyeballs in dead bodies.'

'Oh dear
— I suppose you want to speak to the Chief Inspector, then?'

'That would be
wonderful
.'

'I'll put you through. You mind yourself
and don't go getting into any trouble.'

The phone bleeped,
then rung. What did she mean,
don't go getting into any trouble
? He was old enough to be her father, yet she was treating him like he was her son.