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 says that she will perform Day One psychiatric evaluations of us. This is mine. I feel everything sink inside me. The ache in my insides, that I had forgotten about, it comes back. I do not know what to say to her.
Then 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.
