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 we went to sleep we would lie there, in the darkness, and we would go through what had happened. I don’t know when or why it began, but it was a habit. An addiction. It was something we always did. Our mother used to say that we jabbered ourselves to sleep. It wasn’t until we were sixteen and we moved into a new house in the city, away from the farm that we grew up on, that we were given separate rooms. I felt the space there, so I carried on talking into the darkness. It was only then that I realized it had always been that way. It wasn’t a conversation. We told each other what had happened, but we were actually talking to ourselves. Without him it was the same. I told myself what had happened, and I told myself what was going to happen on the next day. Look back, then peer forward. As an adult, speaking to myself, I pictured myself as a scientist, in a white coat, standing at the front delivering a lecture or a sermon. Increasingly, I could feel the pull of becoming somebody great. I wonder if he still does it now, with his baker lying next to him: if he mumbles to himself as I do, barely comprehensible but understandable by my own ears.
Here and now, I talk to myself. I tell myself what happened in the day that has just been, and before that, back to the last time I remember sleep as it is here: in a bed, and of my own volition.
I sleep, and there are dreams, but I do not remember them. I suppose that’s better, sometimes: to not have that looseness concerning their reality. When I wake up, I forget where I am for a second, because I could be anywhere but here. I push the lid of the bed and it opens upwards, and I see that they are all crowded around Tobi’s bed: I can see the back of her head, and I can see Inna peering into her eye, shining a light in there. I am selfish. I worry about my own being first, checking myself before asking about her. The white spots in my vision are gone, but my gut still creaks, and my body hurts. I do not know how long I slept for, because there is only a constant darkness outside to judge it from, and there are no clocks visible from here. I unclip myself and push up, turning to look at them. Wallace is here looking at Tobi with Inna, and he nods at me in that way that comfortable men do: dipping his head, no smile on his face. This is my good morning.
‘How is she?’ I ask.
‘I’m fine,’ Tobi says. ‘Freaked out, maybe.’ She nods at Inna, who lifts a screen to Tobi’s face. It mirrors Tobi’s eye back at her. I can see it from here as well: the sclera completely red, the cornea and pupil a muddy brown, floating in the midst of the bloody mess. I can see Tobi struggle to hold it together, her eyelid twitching, but she manages. ‘How did it happen?’ she asks. Her voice sounds dulled and slow, and somehow using a slightly lower register than usual. Perhaps she is still sedated, or the effects are wearing off: I can imagine Inna wanting to ease her into this, in case the shock causes a relapse of whatever her fit before was.
‘It’s nothing to be scared of. Sometimes, bleeds can happen in the eye. They’re as full of veins as the rest of you, and they’re tiny. It was most likely the pressure up here.’ She says that as if there’s a direction. So curious: we call space
