she’s doing. We liked that, and so we sought a balance with our other pilot, Hikaru. Asian by way of Wales, in the United Kingdom, and the single calmest man I have ever met. He is – and Tomas laughs at this cliché, always has done – but he is very zen. Something like that. He isn’t a Buddhist; instead, he follows one of the religions that sprang up in the last decade, one of those new ones designed to help organize your life, straighten out your way of thinking, promote productivity. It is not my business what you believe in or how you worship, only that you are good at your job. He eats nothing but white food, wears only white clothes. No pressure for us: we made sure that as many of the meal bars were bleached as possible, and he has his own supply. We are very accepting.
Next to him, my research assistant, Lennox Deng. He’s young and eager and irritating. Top of his year, I am told, although that means nothing to me. Tomas was top of our class, which leads to him believing that it’s a lofty achievement. I was third, but that was because I was attempting other things. I was pushing the envelope, trying to see further than just the research we were tasked with. Lennox, to me, is a follower, therefore. I see him as the sort of person who will do as I say because he wants to get the best report. Perhaps this is what you want from an assistant in a place like this. He is insistent and obsessed with the wonder of this endeavour, as a child might be. I am perhaps more practical now. Not that the stars are not magnificent, because they are: but I have seen them. I have spent my life looking at them. With this mission, perhaps there is a chance for something else? Answers, rather than wonder. What we will find out there might not be visually stunning, it might not be something that decorates a postcard, but it might be an answer to something. What is the question? Well, we don’t know that yet either. But Lennox: he is two birds with the one stone, a degree in engineering and a doctorate in astrophysics. Maybe he wasn’t my first choice, but he’s a sensible one. Besides which, it was an easy win I could give to Tomas.
Then there is our doctor, but she isn’t here yet. She is arriving tonight. She has been in last-minute training sessions, because she was a replacement. Our original doctor, some prick from Los Angeles, as they so often are, he bailed at the last minute. I said to Tomas that I could see it coming. He was that sort of person. We went through uniforms, training: millions of dollars spent on him, essentially. He kept asking questions about what happened on the Ishiguro, why it didn’t come back, and we kept saying, We don’t know, it just didn’t, but we have taken every precaution, blah blah blah. We told him, categorically, that it wouldn’t happen to us, but that didn’t make any difference in the end. He disappeared. So we went to the backup: Inna Gulansky. She’s amazing, really. She’s older than Tomas and myself by some years, and she’s been a field surgeon for most of her life. Tomas found her file, and I went with his choice, so that we could sign her off as quickly as possible. I didn’t question the choice once I saw her history. She was the doctor who came up to operate on the ISS last decade, so she’s already done zero-g triage, things that the guy she’s replacing could have only dreamed of. But her final stages of training have been happening without us, tucked away in some warehouse in Moscow, and that training prevented her coming up here with the rest of us. They wanted to ensure that she was absolutely ready. I have only met her a handful of times, but I can already tell that she will be an invaluable asset. I have told her, This will be an injury-free trip, that’s my decree, and she said, Well, why am I coming then? That is a good question! I said. She is full of good questions.
Now, here, when we’re nervous, everybody wants to talk with Tobi and Hikaru. She’s bright and bubbly, and she’s got so many stories about her life that it’s almost distracting; whereas he’s a picture of perfect calm, so much that it’s almost infectious. He tells us first about meditative techniques we can use when we are nervous about situations such as this, and then she tells a story about her father taking her up in a plane, about her first crash – her first landing where the plane didn’t survive but she walked away – when she was sixteen.
‘It’s all about knowing how to meet the ground,’ she says.
‘Not a lot of that where we’re going,’ Wallace says. His quip disarms her, throws her story off. She tilts her head at him and squints. She does that, I’ve noticed, when people make a joke at her expense. It rolls off. I seize the opportunity, the gap in the conversation. Tomas told me that I should make a speech to rouse them, to make sure that we’re all on the same page. I cough for attention, and I push slightly away from the wall, into the middle of the room. They all look at me. I do not know that I am much of a leader, but I am something. I am what they’ve got.
‘Hello,’ I begin, ‘I just wanted to say a few words. There will be more tomorrow, and the press will be involved, but this is just all of us, now. We have important work to be doing out there. Very important work.’ They are all smiling. Maybe they are just humouring me, because I know that I am bad at speeches, bad at all of this stuff. I know that I am not making eye contact with them; I am looking at my hands, at the paper that I wish I had to read from. I know all of this. ‘We all remember when they did this last. We remember how it all went wrong. But they were different, because they didn’t have you people as a crew.’ I have lost their smiles. I haven’t thought this through. I ask myself how Tomas would save this, and I remember the champagne substitute. I raise my flask. ‘So, you know,’ I say, and I start clapping my hand against the flask, ‘applaud yourselves! To us!’ I raise it high, and then I say it again. ‘To us!’ They all repeat it, and we all drink, and I see them looking at each other, little glances out of the sides of their eyes. I have fucked this up, I know.
I quietly mumble at them that I have to go and do some final checks, so I fluster to the rail, leaving my food but taking my flask, and I pull myself along and back to my room. It takes too long, and when I am there I fasten myself to the chair with the magnets and I call Tomas, and I swallow the remains of my drink back in one, sucking it through the little semi-permeable straw and feeling it spark and fizz on my tongue and the back of my throat.
‘Did you inspire them?’ he asks. He was listening, I am sure. Why would he not have been listening? So this is a lie, his asking me. It’s him giving me a chance.
‘I did my best,’ I say. ‘What are you doing?’
‘We’re watching projections of what could happen if it all goes wrong.’ I don’t ask him any more about them. I’ve seen the projections myself. We are sure that we will be fine; but in case we’re not, we have to run these things. They are terrifying, because there isn’t a single one in which any of the crew manage to survive.
The reason for this mission is to examine something that we do not understand. We know it as an anomaly. We first knew about the anomaly – and, by we, I mean the world – six years after the Ishiguro went missing. The world was not told about the anomaly at the time, and so when they disappeared and didn’t come back, it was a complete disaster. Tomas and I watched it on the news: the desperate wait for any sort of news from the lost shuttle. There were so many cameras in the launch centre, with the men and their computers and the branding everywhere. Showing endless, constant VT of the various astronauts as if they were participants in a reality show. Eventually the cameras packed up, and the news cycle was reduced to a small notice at the end that simply stated how many days they had been missing for. Everybody moved on. There was a funeral when it was decided that their fuel would have run out, that their life support would have disappeared. And then, after a while, they worked out where the ship must have dropped off the radar, and then later, they announced more details. A drip-feed of updates, holding things back when they were not ready for public consumption. Records from the ship’s journey; information from the journalist, useless and garbled.
Then one day the newly named UNSA announced that they knew of something, out there in space, out where the Ishiguro had been. The UNSA was little more than a conglomerate of companies and investors and governmental bodies plucked from the remnants of NASA and other space agencies, given a ridiculous name to seem important. They disclosed that the thing first appeared a decade before. There was patch of space that nobody could see
