The Edge, page 15
Like a finger, pressing into the oily glimmer of a bubble; before sinking in, except the bubble doesn’t pop, but assents, and the finger enters.
The tether tightens fully, the station locked in place. The Raft stops. Suddenly, it’s perfectly still, halfway into the Anomaly. The sides of the unknown thing sludged up against the unpainted metal of the ship.
I speak into my comm: ‘Gibson?’ I want an answer, so I ask again.
Just the hiss of white noise; a hiss I’m sure I hear voices in.
I look back at the station, suddenly much closer to the Anomaly, where it had felt as if we were too close already. I see the faces of the others: Sian turned away, Desh with his eyes shut, Mon watching me, biting her nails to the quick. Berry is still, calm, blank. Hyvönen, though; he’s moving, shuffling quickly, away from the donut, towards the airlocks. And then his voice, in my ears. ‘Miss Becker, I have to ask a favour of you. Would you please find out if Mr Gibson survived the trip into the Anomaly for me?’
‘He isn’t answering his comm.’
‘No, he isn’t. But that doesn’t mean he’s trapped, or worse.’ He clears his throat, loud in my ear. ‘Please, Miss Becker.’
I puff towards the ship, suddenly so still.
There’s an element of it like part of a mobile, hung over Theo’s crib, spaceships and stars and planets for him to twiddle his fingers at, to play and manipulate, as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star jittered from a tiny battery-powered speaker, and I sang to him, trying to match the pitch that seemed to alter every few seconds. There the Raft is, suspended, extant. Nothing on either side of it, no reason for it to sit where it does.
I reach the Raft, and I put my hands on it again, and I pull myself along its body. Windows, and I peer through, but there’s nothing to be seen, no movement. Lights on, yes, but I can’t see the cockpit, can’t get the proper angle.
‘I don’t see him,’ I say.
‘Keep going,’ he tells me.
So I do, every window, every access point; until finally I am next to the Anomaly. I am a foot from it, a few inches. My hand could touch it. A liquid, a solid, I can’t tell. A substance I have never seen before, never even contemplated. A texture that is somehow entirely void of texture, absent of anything.
‘Go inside the ship,’ Hyvönen tells me.
‘I can’t open the door,’ I say. ‘There’s no airlock.’
‘He will be safe,’ Hyvönen says.
‘If he’s in there, and I open the door, he’ll die.’
‘Please, Miss Becker, you are going to have to trust me.’
‘Then you’re going to have to start giving me answers.’
‘So I will. Go inside the ship, if you will.’
I try again to see Gibson; and I say, into my comm, that he needs to move, to put his helmet on if he can hear me, because there is a vacuum about to remove the air from the cabin.
I think of the times Gibson brayed when Cohen mocked me; the times he stood back and let it happen.
And yet.
‘I’m opening the door now,’ I say, into the comm, to Gibson and Hyvönen both; then I pull the lever, moving to one side as the door ejects.
I didn’t think this through. The door opens, and everything inside the ship that isn’t fastened is sucked out, a rush of terrible energy; detritus, boxes, stuff we were taking home, heaved towards the station, and I watch it; and my head screams at me, sudden, painful. Like fingers driven into my skull, manipulating all that is inside of me, squeezing and forcing me to wince, to howl as I look back there—
I see myself before, I remember myself, in the corridor of the Zvezda module, on my knees, the airlock open, waiting to die. My vision blurring, my eyes wet, and I scream—
‘Miss Becker, please control yourself,’ the old man says.
Control yourself.
My vision clears, and I am clinging to the door frame, where the door was once fixed; and Hyvönen is talking to me, in my ear, ‘Please answer me, Miss Becker,’ and I pull myself into the ship; as if being inside the shell is somehow going to make me feel better. Less as if I am losing myself in these moments. My back against the wall of the ship, something stable to push against, as the colour comes back, as the headache pain fades, and my hands stop their trembling.
‘I’m okay,’ I say, and I turn, to look to my right, to the cockpit, and I see the thick wall of darkness inside here, intersecting this ship, dividing it. A line, like a hot knife through a brick of butter. ‘The Anomaly is inside here,’ I say. It has filled the gap, halfway up the ship to the cockpit. Water poured into a vessel, into every single nook and cranny.
‘We are watching your feed,’ Hyvönen replies.
‘Gibson,’ I say, or shout; but he won’t hear me, not with my helmet, not with the vacuum; and he doesn’t reply on the comm.
This darkness. The membrane, shining in the light of my helmet. The darkness, the colours in it. Puddles of petrol on the side of the road when I was a child, mixing with water.
In the right light, you can see the colours.
I reach for the Anomaly, and Hyvönen’s voice, as frantic as I have ever heard him, barks back at me. ‘Don’t touch it,’ he says. ‘Don’t interact with it.’
‘Where is Gibson?’ I ask him. ‘Why the fuck ask me to come into this thing?’
‘I have never seen a dissection so clear.’ His voice is quivering, full of something. Wistfulness? ‘My brother was lost, and so many others. And I have never seen a dissection so clear as this, not up close.’
‘You’re not seeing it up close,’ I say, ‘I am.’
And then I see the helmet: from inside the Anomaly, pushed out, towards me. Momentum, not drift. Pushed, and hard, thudding into the wall, deadening its path.
‘He’s alive,’ I say. ‘Gibson’s alive.’
They bring me back to the station, and as I sit there, still wearing my suit, Mon stares into my eyes, shines a light to see behind them. The after-image of the veins, trilling red lines across everything for moments when she pulls away. Hyvönen props himself up in the corner, running his hand over the hair he’s got, softening it down, his nails scraping thin white lines along his scalp. Nobody speaks for the longest time. Sian and Desh work on something, running simulations. I see Desh’s eyes, left to right, scanning information then resetting it, over and over.
Finally, I talk. ‘Are we going to get him?’ I ask. Nobody replies. Sian glances at Hyvönen, who knows she’s doing it, somehow, and waves his hand at her, swats her gaze away without even looking back. ‘He’s alive in there,’ I say. ‘He’s meant to be dead.’
‘He is dead,’ Hyvönen says. His voice as measured and calm as I’ve ever heard it.
‘He threw the helmet. He wanted to get my attention—’
‘So he’s not wearing a helmet now. Ergo, he is dead.’
‘There are spares.’
‘And they have a finite amount of oxygen. Ergo,’ he repeats, ‘he is dead.’
‘Maybe the Anomaly makes a seal? Maybe there’s oxygen behind its wall.’
‘That isn’t how it works,’ he says. A finality that suggests knowledge he hasn’t shared with me. ‘The rules of oxygen, they’re the same in there as out here. He is dead.’
‘There might be a window,’ Sian says, almost apologetically.
‘A window? Into the Anomaly?’ I ask.
‘No, of time,’ Mon says. The others shoot her a look – don’t speak, what are you doing speaking – but she continues. ‘There might be a window of time that we could rescue him, that’s what Sian’s saying.’
‘You just said he’s dead,’ I say, but nobody’s listening.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Hyvönen says. ‘The experiment is over.’
‘Jesus Christ, man,’ Mon says. ‘Grow a fucking soul!’ Nobody else seems shocked at her reaction. Do no harm, that’s her job’s creed. ‘You don’t want to rescue him? Fine, hope you fucking sleep at night. But we need a ship to get us home.’ She looks at Hyvönen, right in the eyes. ‘We get the Raft, or we’re taking Ukonvasara home. Screw your little plan, okay? Screw it all.’
‘Can we drag it back?’ I ask.
‘Not without killing Gibson again,’ Sian says. ‘He’ll be crushed between the Anomaly wall and the cockpit. Might even damage the Raft, we haven’t done pressure tests on the wall yet.’
Again. Yet. They have done tests, other tests. I don’t understand, I don’t understand. I think about sending my drones out to the Anomaly. Watching them run out of battery, or lose contact. Mice, dying in there.
‘So when he’s dead, we bring the ship back. Then he can pass through, right? We can try and resuscitate him.’ Mon paces, thinking as she talks. Hyvönen shakes his head, but not in denial. Something else.
‘That could work,’ Sian says. ‘Desh can run the window timings, based on the oxygen he’s got. It depends on his reset time. But we could get a note in there, a pen and paper, he could tell us when the oxygen runs out, give us more of a clue. Or he could throw something else—’
‘I’m sorry, but what the fuck is happening?’ I ask the room, and they look at me. It feels like all of them are on the verge of telling me the truth when Hyvönen stands.
He clears his throat a little. A professor, imparting knowledge.
‘Death is not the same in the Anomaly,’ he says. ‘We thought for the longest time that being inside it was an ending, simply because contact was lost when somebody passed through the boundary. Starting so far back, with the Ishiguro, we assumed death. But I told you about my brother’s black box, yes? It gave us hope. And we discovered that so much of what we assumed was correct: there is no coming back, once you have passed over. Inside there, it is dark, and there is no light. We have not lied to you, Miss Becker. You have always been told the truth.’
‘Within limits,’ Mon says. ‘And with omissions.’
I am the last to know. I think that I am always the last to know: the last to be told about my own condition, the last to have my diagnosis forced upon me, even as I shouted that I was fine; I am fine.
‘Time works strangely up here, this you already are aware of.’ Hyvönen frames it rhetorically, but he’s right: days are lost, and circadian rhythms can only carry us so far. ‘Inside the Anomaly, it is stranger still.’ He sighs, as if this is a story he’s told too many times; as if it isn’t interesting enough to bear another telling. ‘My brother was lost. And then, as if by magic, he was found again.’ He nods at Sian, who swipes on her wrist, throwing information onto one of the medical bay screens. Life signs; I recognize life signs. A green bar, dipping to the flat red. ‘When we recovered the black box, it had recorded my brother’s own life cycles. Here, he’s alive; and then he is dead. Over and over and over again, alive and then dead.’
‘He was resuscitated?’ I ask.
‘In a manner of speaking. We have come to talk of this as a cycle. All of life is a cycle; what happened to my brother and the crew of the Lära is merely a wheel within a wheel.’
‘The whole crew?’
More life signs join the existing one on the screen. Not on the same timeframe, but all with the same dipped red. ‘Their cycles begin at the same point, and then peter off, one by one; until Mira was the only one left. And when he was gone, the cycle began anew.’ I feel my hands shaking, but I am remarkably calm. ‘The best we have posited is that he died, and began again alive.’
‘Began again.’ I say the phrase, not quite a question, as if I’m trying it out; trying to see how it fits. ‘He began again.’
‘His life signs tell their tale. If you see here,’ he says, and points, but he’s not looking where he’s pointing, the well-rehearsed casual behaviour of the lecturer inside him, ‘the pattern is the same. A consistency of his behaviours, with no variance between them. The only time variance occurs is in those final moments, when, perhaps, he sees something … different.’
‘But that’s guesswork,’ Sian says.
‘Yes.’ Hyvönen smiles at me, as if this is normal.
‘So he comes back to life?’
‘Or the Anomaly makes it as though he never died. We don’t know, it’s very hard to tell; if there is even a difference, of course.’
‘How many times? How many times has it happened?’
‘A great many. We can only estimate. But a great many.’
‘A hundred? A thousand?’
He sighs. ‘A great many times,’ he says, and I think about pushing, but I know he won’t tell me. As if the number might somehow make the situation worse.
‘Does he know?’
‘His cycles do not deviate. If he knew, perhaps they would. He would impart that, to us. But I am positive, each time, that he is aware that death is coming.’ I’m silent. ‘It is coming for me as well,’ he says, and there’s a sadness there, in the way that he says it. ‘It’s coming for all of us, the great inevitable. But perhaps I have never been one for inevitability.’
‘What about the others in there?’
‘As best we know, they are the same. It is very sad.’ He doesn’t sound sad as he delivers this news, or concerned, or contrite. ‘The crew of the Ishiguro, of every ship we have sent in there. We have to believe that they are reliving their experiences as my brother is.’ I picture the test pilots, their ships exploding, their nukes sent with prayers to puncture the Anomaly, and failing; and that is not the end for them. The thought makes me shiver; makes sick in my throat. ‘This is a lot to take in, I know.’ He has just told me that time in the Anomaly is unnatural; that there is eternal life in there, or eternal death; and, are the two actually any different at all? But he smiles as if he’s told me that I have to retake a paper, or that my test results mean I will need to stay on the pills that have been prescribed to me.
The smile when they told me it was a boy. Do I want to know the sex? they asked, but the answer was already on their tongue; and Xavier said, Yes, even though we hadn’t decided. I wanted an envelope, the gender written inside it; a private moment we could choose to open, at home, if we wanted to.
Xavier only wanted to see his dick, of course.
‘So he’s alive in there, Gibson’s alive in there,’ I hear myself saying, ‘but he will die. And then he will be alive again. Will he know?’
‘He knows what happens when you go inside the Anomaly. He has been party to it. But he will not know the details, not from one reset to the next.’ Reset, the same word that Sian used before: they have already developed a lexis to discuss this thing. Their secret, all in this together. All of them, that is, except for me. ‘He will not realize what’s happening to him, that each time isn’t the first.’ A hesitancy, the words formed carefully.
‘You’re lying,’ I say.
He nods, just the slightest tilt of his head. ‘We have reason to believe that, the longer you are in there, the more you remember. Memories, perhaps, being slightly more … invasive to the reset brain than one would imagine.’ He shuts his eyes for a moment; a full-stop on that line of enquiry.
‘And we can’t just go in and get him.’
‘Living tissue cannot pass through the wall.’ He says it with the utmost seriousness, and I bark a laugh, because it’s so fucking ridiculous. ‘Not leaving it, at least.’
‘It’s got this tension to it,’ Sian says. ‘It’s like a membrane. Like a—’ She looks at Mon for backup.
‘Semi-permeable membrane. You can pass through this way, but the other … It just doesn’t work.’ Mon won’t look at me as she talks. The lie, or the withholding.
‘He threw the helmet, though.’
‘Yeah. It’s only living things that can’t pass through.’
Their plan, the plan being posited, hits me. ‘You want to bring him back when he dies. That’s the window, that’s the time. He’ll be alive—’
‘And then he’ll die, and we can bring the ship back, and we can get the fuck off this thing,’ Mon says. She’s looking towards the Anomaly, no window for her to see through, but she doesn’t need it. Shutting her eyelids, and the darkness that you see then; that’s all she needs.
Desh pulls his glasses off and looks at me. ‘You okay?’
‘Yes,’ I say, but I am not. I am not. ‘You knew the truth,’ I say.
‘Not everything,’ he says. ‘I only got told when I needed to know.’
‘And when was that?’ My question not directed at Desh, but at Hyvönen, at Sian. At Mon. ‘What was the trigger that made you tell people?’
‘Snipes,’ Sian says. ‘When Snipes went, that’s when they were told.’
Snipes. He knew, of course he knew. He was going to die in there, and then come back to life. That’s why he killed himself first.
The night before he was meant to be leaving to travel into the Anomaly – that is, also, the night before he died – Snipes and I spent hours talking. He told me before that he didn’t want to start anything, but sometimes things just start. You can’t help it: how easily conversation can flow, how smoothly words can pass in ways that somebody else likes to hear. And with Snipes, it was easy, in the way that it had never been easy with Xavier. Xavier’s entire mode of being was the conversation of light antagonism: that a conversation should interrogate to reach a conclusion, and flow was something measured and worked for by the ebb and flow of opinions and ideals. He pushed, and pulled, but never gave. Snipes liked to listen, and to agree. Not because he felt that he should, but because that was how it came to him; that he wasn’t the be-all.
He had been married previously, but they never had a child. His wife had left him when he became ill the first time – there were a lot of first times with him, a sense that remission for him led to erasure, and then the recurrence of the cancer somehow was a new phase of his life – so he bore her plenty of ill-will, he said. He laughed when he said it. ‘We’ve all got baggage,’ he said. ‘I’ve just learned to not even pretend I don’t give a shit. She was – is – an awful person.’ He smiled then. ‘I’ve become used to speaking about everybody else in the past tense,’ he said. ‘How weird is that? I’m the one leaving, but everybody else is kind of already gone.’
